Biggle, Lloyd, Jr. 1923–2002

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Biggle, Lloyd, Jr. 1923–2002

PERSONAL: Born April 17, 1923, in Waterloo, IA; died of leukemia, September 12, 2002; son of Lloyd B. (an electrician) and Ethel (Cruthers) Biggle; married Hedwig T. Janiszewski (a violin teacher), June 21, 1947; children: Donna Helene, Kenneth Lloyd. Education: Wayne University (now Wayne State University), A.B. (with high distinction), 1947; University of Michigan, M.M., 1948, Ph.D., 1953.

CAREER: Writer and musicologist. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, teacher of music literature and history, 1948–51; taught at Eastern Michigan University, Ypsilanti, c. 1950s. Military service: U.S. Army, 102nd Infantry Division; served during World War II; became sergeant; received Purple Heart with oak leaf cluster.

MEMBER: Science Fiction Oral History Association (founding president, 1977–87, 1989–94), Science Fiction Writers of America (founding secretary treasurer and chair of board of trustees, 1965–73).

AWARDS, HONORS: Hugo Award nomination for short story, 1962; Nebula Award nomination, Science Fiction Writers of America, 1966, for Watchers of the Dark; New York Public Library Books for the Teenage list, 1980, for Silence Is Deadly.

WRITINGS:

SCIENCE FICTION NOVELS

The Angry Espers, Ace Books (New York, NY), 1961.

The Fury out of Time, Doubleday (Garden City, NY), 1965.

The Still, Small Voice of Trumpets, Doubleday (Garden City, NY), 1968.

The World Menders, Doubleday (Garden City, NY), 1971.

The Light That Never Was, Doubleday (Garden City, NY), 1972.

Monument, Doubleday (Garden City, NY), 1974.

(With T.L. Sherred) Alien Main, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1985.

"JAN DARZEK" SERIES; SCIENCE FICTION

All the Colors of Darkness, Doubleday (Garden City, NY), 1963.

Watchers of the Dark, Doubleday (Garden City, NY), 1966.

This Darkening Universe, Doubleday (Garden City, NY), 1975.

Silence Is Deadly, Doubleday (Garden City, NY), 1977.

The Whirligig of Time, Doubleday (Garden City, NY), 1979.

The Chronocide Mission, e-book edition, Wildside Press (Rockville, MD), 2002, print edition, 2003.

OTHER

The Rule of the Door and Other Fanciful Regulations (short stories), Doubleday (Garden City, NY), 1967, published as Out of the Silent Sky, Belmont Books (New York, NY), 1977.

The Metallic Muse: A Collection of Science Fiction Stories, Doubleday (Garden City, NY), 1972.

(Editor) Nebula Award Stories 7, Harper (New York, NY), 1973.

A Galaxy of Strangers (short stories), Doubleday (Garden City, NY), 1976.

The Quallsford Inheritance: A Memoir of Sherlock Holmes from the Papers of Edward Porter Jones, His Late Assistant (novel), St. Martin's (New York, NY), 1986.

Interface for Murder (mystery novel), Doubleday (New York, NY), 1987.

The Glendower Conspiracy: A Memoir of Sherlock Holmes: From the Papers of Edward Porter Jones, His Late Assistant (novel), Council Oak Books (Tulsa, OK), 1990.

A Hazard of Losers (mystery novel), Council Oak Books (Tulsa, OK), 1991.

Where Dead Soldiers Walk, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1994.

Contributor to science fiction and mystery anthologies, including The Century's Best Science Fiction; contributor of more than seventy-five stories to magazines. Author's manuscript collection is housed at the Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas, Lawrence.

SIDELIGHTS: Often associated with science fiction, Lloyd Biggle, Jr., also wrote mysteries, including books that borrowed from the Sherlock Holmes stories of Arthur Conan Doyle. In The Glendower Conspiracy: A Memoir of Sherlock Holmes: From the Papers of Edward Porter Jones, His Late Assistant Biggle tells of a case in which Jones helps Holmes investigate a murder in Wales with vast political implications. Sybil Steinberg wrote in Publishers Weekly that Biggle "creates eerie effects with details on isolated locales and characters." The author, however, remained best known for his works in science fiction. A contributor to the St. James Guide to Science Fiction Writers held that the author's "greatest strength is in creating believable alien worlds and civilizations, complete with native flora and fauna, linguistic idiosyncrasies, customs of courtship and marriage, provisions for raising children, social intercourse and folkways (always inseparable from economic trade and business affairs), religion, systems of government, and culture in its most inclusive sense."

Biggle's last novel, The Chronocide Mission, was first published electronically at about the time of his death in 2002; a paperback edition followed the next year. The story follows a young college student in Ohio as he is propelled three centuries into the future, where aristocrats rule the world and are easily identified as such because they have two names. Artisans and merchants have only one name, and most of humanity is a nameless work force whose minds have been obliterated by a high-tech device. Once in the future, Vladislav Kuznetsov is given the name of Egarn and eventually comes to understand the workings of a devastating weapon that he discovers is also a time machine. He then sends two people back in time to destroy the machines inventor, who unwittingly caused the destruction of society as Egarn knew it as a youth. Calling the book "a complicated work of wonderfully interwoven plots and ideas" on the eFigments Review Web site, J. Crispin-Ripley went on to comment that Biggle is "a writer … second to none" in the realm of science fiction. A Publishers Weekly contributor called the novel an "alluring tale of time travel."

Biggle once told CA: "When I was nine years old, I decided to be a writer—a poet. I had poems published in the school paper at that age. One of them was my first science fiction story, written in the form of a poem." The author continued, "Many people seem to think that a professional writer should have been doing something more advanced than that at the age of nine—writing epics, perhaps. But if you are to write, the important thing is that you must start. I did start, and I did work to improve my writing…. The longer I write, the more I learn from and about writing.

"I am a story teller. It is an ancient and honorable profession, though I don't know how many authors actually think of themselves in this light. To the story teller, the most important character in any story is the reader. Teachers will tell students to 'express themselves,' put themselves in what they write. That is the function of poetry. Most poems are long capital I's. I feel this, I see that. Prose, a story, is written to someone. When I autograph books, I often write, 'No book is complete without a reader.' This is the story teller's attitude.

"The question most frequently asked of science fiction authors is where they get those crazy ideas. Remember that the author lives in the same world you live in, resides in the same sort of community many of you reside in, walks his dog, mows his lawn, reads the same or similar newspapers, pays the same taxes, and has the same TV programs available (though he probably does not watch television nearly as much as you do!). The one major difference between authors and normal people is likely to be with their reading. Most authors read omnivorously (a good word for readers to know) and incessantly. Apart from that, writers see and experience many of the same things that you, the readers, see and experience. Their crazy ideas are no different from your crazy ideas—but they have trained themselves to turn ideas and events and experiences inside out, magnify them in different ways, color them differently, and make all sorts of whimsical changes in their search for story material. They must be able to recognize that material when they find it."

The author continued: "Musical 'themes' and art 'themes' run through my writing. If my background had been medicine, or athletics, or electronics, or mechanics, I still might have discovered the same ideas for stories in the same places, but the stories I wrote certainly would have been very different."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 8: Twentieth-Century American Science-Fiction Writers, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1981.

St. James Guide to Science Fiction Writers, 4th edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1996.

PERIODICALS

Publishers Weekly, May 25, 1990, Sybil Steinberg, review of The Glendower Conspiracy: A Memoir of Sherlock Holmes: From the Papers of Edward Porter Jones, His Late Assistant, p. 53; April 1, 2002, review of The Chronocide Mission, p. 58.