YOUNG, Robert F(ranklin)

(1915-1986)

   US writer who turned full-time after engaging in a number of menial occupations. His first sf story was "The Black Deep Thou Wingest" for Startling Stories in 1953, and he published short work quite prolifically for the next 3 decades. RFY was a slick, polished writer; his stories are readable, although often superficial. The best generally appeared in FSF, although he wrote also for most of the US sf magazines and for the Saturday Evening Post and others. His modes ranged from the heavily satiric - typified by a series of stories, "Chrome Pastures" (1956), "Thirty Days Had September" (1957) and "Romance in a Twenty-FirstCentury Used Car Lot" (1960), in which the US automobile mania is extrapolated to absurd extremes - to the strongly allegorical, in such tales as "Goddess in Granite" (1957); but a romantic sensibility, at rare intervals mawkish, permeated all his work. His earlier stories were assembled in The Worlds of Robert F. Young (coll 1965) and A Glass of Stars (coll 1968); the numerous tales published after 1968 remainuncollected. After a novel released only in French, La Quete de la Sainte Grille (1964 AMZ as "The Quest of the Holy Grille"; exp 1975 France), RFYpublished in Starfinder (fixup 1980) a stirringly romantic SPACE OPERA whose main device - riding to the STARS within the bodies of dead "space whales" - is powerfully evocative; it is by far his best novel in English. The Last Yggdrasil (1959 FSF as "To Fell a Tree"; exp 1982), anover-extended novel version of a strong story, seems sentimental in contrast, failing to impart much plausibility to the story of a tree-cutter on a colony planet who is hired to kill the one huge remaining tree in the area, to the entirely predictable detriment of the planet's ECOLOGY. RFY's final novels - Eridahn (1964 If as "When Time was New"; exp1983), which features TIME TRAVEL into prehistory, and The Vizier's Second Daughter (1965 AMZ as "City of Brass"; exp 1985), a humorous fantasy - neither built nor detracted from his reputation. He will be best remembered for some of the acerbic short tales of his early career.

   MJE/JC

   See also: AMAZING STORIES; MESSIAHS; PSYCHOLOGY; ROBOTS; TRANSPORTATION.