Acclaimed Swiss artist H. (Hansreudi) R. (Rudolf) Giger died on May 12 from injuries suffered during a fall. He was 74. Giger is best known for his iconic Oscar-winning designs for Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979), and his conceptual work was also featured in Alien³, Species, Killer Condom, Alien: Resurrection, Species II, AVP: Alien vs. Predator, Alien vs. Predator: Requiem and Alejandro Jodorowsky’s ill-fated adaptation of Dune in the mid-1970s. Giger also directed documentary shorts, including Giger’s Necronomicon and Giger’s Alien, and his distinctive “biomechanical” artwork has been featured in such books as A Rh+, H.R. Giger’s Necronomicon, H.R. Giger’s Alien, H.R. Giger’s Biomechanics and Baphomet, amongst other titles. He was named a Spectrum Grandmaster in 2005 and inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2013.
Innovative American graphic designer and illustrator Tony Palladino (Anthony Americo Paladino), who created the fractured logo type for Robert Bloch’s 1959 novel Psycho (and the subsequent movie series), died of complications from pneumonia on May 14, aged 84. “How do you do a better image of Psycho than the word itself?” he once said.
British comics editor Vanessa “Vee” Morgan died of cancer on May 17, aged 63. During the late 1970s and early ‘80s she edited a number of DC Comics reprint magazines for London Editions Magazines, including The Super Heroes Monthly and Superman Spectacular, for which she also commissioned original material by such newcomers as Alan Moore, Brian Bolland, Garry Leach and others. She later compiled reprints from 2000 AD for Dez Skinn’s Quality Communication and edited the children’s newspaper Scoop.
Romanian academic and historian Professor Radu [Nicolae] Florescu died of complications from pneumonia in France on May 18, aged 88. With his colleague Raymond T. McNally (who died in 2002), he wrote the 1972 bestseller In Search of Dracula: The History of Dracula and Vampires, which linked Bram Stoker’s fictional character to the historical 15th-century voivod Vlad Tepes. Florescu’s other books included In Search of Frankenstein: Exploring the Myths Behind Mary Shelley’s Monster, In Search of the Pied Piper, Dracula’s Bloodline (with Matei Cazacu) and, again with McNally, Dracula: A Biography of Vlad the Impaler, The Essential Dracula: A Completely Illustrated & Annotated Edition of Bram Stoker’s Classic Novel, Dracula: Prince of Many Faces: His Life and Times and In Search of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
British SF fan Ken Brown, who regularly reviewed books for Interzone when the magazine was edited by David Pringle, died of pancreatic cancer on May 19, aged 57.
American publisher Oscar Dystel, who turned around failing US imprint Bantam Books in the early 1950s and remained as Chairman until 1980, died on May 28, aged 101. Among his best-selling acquisitions were William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist, Peter Benchley’s Jaws and the Star Trek franchise.
American movie and television historian and critic Steven H. (Henry) Scheuer died of congestive heart failure on May 31, aged 88. He edited seventeen editions of the innovative reference guide Movies on TV (1958-93), and his other books include Who’s Who in Television and Cable and The Complete Guide to Videocassette Movies.
American SF and fantasy author Jay Lake (Joseph Edward Lake, Jr.) died on June 1, aged 49. He had been suffering from cancer since 2008. His novels include Rocket Science, Trial of Flowers, Mainspring, Escapement, Madness of Flowers, Green, Pinion, Endurance, Kalimpura and Lady of the Islands (with Shannon Page). He also edited the anthologies All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories (with David Moles), TEL: Stories, Spicy Slipstream Stories (with Nick Mamatas), The Exquisite Corpuscle (with Frank Wu), Other Earths (with Nick Gevers), Footprints (with Eric T. Reynolds) and the first six volumes of Polyphony (with Deborah Layne, 2002-06). Lake’s acclaimed short fiction was collected in Greetings from Lake Wu, Green Grow the Rushes-Oh, American Sorrows, Dogs in the Moonlight, The River Knows Its Own, The Sky That Wraps and the posthumous The Last Plane to Heaven, while his stories ‘The Goat Cutter’ and ‘The American Dead’ appeared, respectively, in volumes #15 and #18 of The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. In 2004, Lake received the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer.
Herb (Herbert) Yellin, who founded the Californian literary imprint Lord John Press in 1978 to publish signed limited editions of modern authors, died on June 13, aged 79. Amongst the many writers he published were Ray Bradbury, Stephen King, Ursual K. Le Guin, Dan Simmons, Joyce Carol Oates and John Updike. Dennis Etchison edited the original anthology Lord John Ten in 1987, which included contributions from Bradbury, Robert Bloch, Ramsey Campbell, William F. Nolan, Whitley Strieber, Roberta Lannes and many others.
American author Daniel Keyes died on June 15, aged 86. He was best known for his Hugo Award-winning SF short story ‘Flowers for Algernon’ (in the April 1959 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction) and the Nebula Award-winning expanded novel version in 1966. It was subsequently filmed as Charly (1968) starring Cliff Robertson, who won an Academy Award for his performance. In the early 1950s, Lester del Rey helped Keyes get a job as an associate editor with the pulp publisher Stadium Publications, where he worked on Marvel Science Stories and the struggling Atlas Comics line. Under the pen names “Kris Daniels” and “A.D. Locke”, he also wrote scripts for such EC comics as Shock Illustrated and Confessions Illustrated. ‘Flowers for Algernon’ was adapted for radio and TV, and as a stage play, a modern dance work, and a musical. Keyes received the SFWA Author Emeritus Life Achievement Award in 2000.