Canadian sf author and poet Phyllis Gottlieb died 14 July 2009. Born Phyllis Bloom in Toronto, Ontario, on 25 May 1926, she received a BA in 1948 and an MA in 1950, both from the University of Toronto.
The Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic was named for Gottlieb’s first novel, Sunburst, which was first published in 1964 (see this article from last week for this year’s nominees). Her first poetry collection, Within the Zodiac, came out the same year. Her first published story, “A Grain of Manhood”, appeared in Fantastic in 1959, and her 1972 novella, “Son of the Morning”, was a Nebula Award nominee.
Gottlieb’s other sf novels include O Master Caliban! (1976), A Judgement of Dragons (1980, winner of the Aurora Award), Emperor, Swords, Pentacles (1982), The Kingdom of the Cats (1985, Aurora nominee), Heart of Red Iron (1989), Flesh and Gold (1998, Aurora and Tiptree nominee), Violent Stars (1999), and MindWorlds (2002). She also published two short story collections: Son of the Morning and Other Stories (1983) and Blue Apes (1995).
Gottlieb was the recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Aurora Award in 1982. She is survived by her husband, Calvin (they married in 1949), three children, and four grandchildren. Cory Doctorow offers this remembrance of her.
The funeral will be 16 July at Adath Israel Synagogue in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Details are on this page. Donations in her memory may be made to the Phyllis Gotlieb Memorial Fund, c/o The Benjamin Foundation, 3429 Bathurst St., Toronto, Ontario, M6A 2C3, Canada. 416-780-0324.
I grew up reading Andre Norton and not knowing she was a woman! (Yes, I did guess…) And then there was “Tiptree, Jr.” – my point is that Phyllis Gottlieb was one of the few female scifi authors in the field I could be sure of! Her books were so well-written, her worlds so self-consistent that they made alternate universes real!
Hate to sound selfish, but who got the rights? I would so enjoy being able to buy hardbacks of her work! All I have is paperbacks – never even heard of Sunburst – and I want them in hardbacks so they can be in my “READ AGAIN FOREVER” library.
I read Sunburst in the 1960s and it really moved me. Of course, I was born in ’52 so I was still young and impressionable (I also thought Heinlein’s Glory Road was terrific, among others). But a book about mutant children with strange abilities fit right in with the nuclear bomb fears of the late fifties and early Sixties. Another great book (well, it seemed so to me at the time) I read around that time was Ian Wallace’s Croyd. You don’t see much mention of these lately but to me back then they seemed magical.