Obituary: Gordon Dixon (original) (raw)

The science-fiction author Gordon Dickson, who has died aged 77, published his first story, Trespass, in 1950, and continued with more than 80 books and some 200 short stories. Even towards the end, when often too ill to leave his house, he produced a book each year. His novels and collections sold more than 10m copies.

Born in Canada, but resident in the United States for most of his life, much of Dickson's work was straightforward commercial SF or fantasy, and deservedly popular as such. Other stories struck a deeper note, while using genre trappings of spaceships, fantastic weaponry and vast conflicts. The lengthy Childe Cycle, or Dorsai sequence, which Dickson regarded as his life's work, is infused with an offbeat personal mysticism that transcends pulp-SF superman fantasies.

In this imagined future, "full-spectrum humanity" - with deep evolutionary roots - still persists on earth, but interstellar colonists have split along philosophical lines into "splinter cultures" of mercenaries, physical scientists, psychologist-mystics and religious fanatics. Unusually for SF, the scientists are the least interesting group, while the devout and their harsh, sustaining faith are presented with special sympathy.

The Childe Cycle features a series of latent supermen who slowly realise their ability to direct history, and the necessary compassion and responsibility needed to accompany such talent. In Dorsai! (1960) and Tactics Of Mistake (1971), they are gifted military strategists, happy warriors who aim for bloodless victory. Soldier, Ask Not (1967) has as its antihero an influential journalist fatally tempted to remould public opinion and destroy the particular splinter culture he loathes. A shorter version of this novel won a 1965 Hugo award, the Oscar of SF.

Further volumes of increasing length, like The Final Encyclopedia (1984), show the partly recombined human race threatened by an evolutionary dead end.

Plans to extend the Childe Cycle backward, with trilogies of historical and contemporary novels, never came to fruition; this ambitious and often impressive sequence seemingly lost its way and remains unfinished. It moved Brian Aldiss to commend Dickson as one of SF's "legendary monsters" who "embark on projects no mainstream author would attempt".

Dickson was further honoured with two 1981 Hugo awards for the short Lost Dorsai - another Childe story, dealing with the torn loyalties of a pacifist mercenary - and the unrelated The Cloak And The Staff. Here, the quasi-religious garb of a pilgrim becomes the rallying symbol for hopeless resistance to physically invincible alien overlords; this was expanded to book length as Way Of The Pilgrim (1987). Call Him Lord, a short, unflinching parable of power and responsibility, brought Dickson a 1966 Nebula award from the Science Fiction Writers of America, of which he became president from 1969-71.

A lighter side of his talent emerged with the Hoka stories, written with Poul Anderson, first collected in Earthman's Burden (1957) and gaining a cult following among SF fans. Hokas are terminally cute, furry, teddy-bear-like aliens whose enthusiasm for earthly culture and inability to tell fact from fiction lead to comically warped Hoka recreations of the old wild west, the melodramatic excesses of opera, the England of Sherlock Holmes, and so on. When the film-maker George Lucas introduced the physically very similar Ewoks in Return Of The Jedi, some readers felt that the Hokas' creators should sue.

D ickson anticipated the recent boom in humorous fantasy with The Dragon And The George (1976), in which the now traditional difficulties of a modern American, projected into a fantasy land of knights, wizards and monsters, are increased by the fact that he finds himself inhabiting the body of a dragon. Well received in Britain, this light-hearted novel won the British Fantasy Society's August Derleth award. Several sequels appeared in the 1990s.

Besides the popularity of his writing, Dickson was personally well liked in SF social circles, where he was a convivial, entertaining speaker (and guitar player) on the north American convention circuit. The 1984 world SF convention in Los Angeles made him its guest of honour, as did the 1988 British national convention in Liverpool.

Gordon Rupert Dickson, author, born November 1 1923; died January 31 2001