S P A C E L I G H T
INDEX
Name: CHALKER, Jack Laurence
Aged: 60
Born: Dec 17, 1944
Where: Baltimore, MD
Died: Feb 11, 2005
Where: Baltimore, MD
Interred: Cremated, ashes scattered variously.
Married: Eva C. Whitley
When: 1978
Awards: Awards include the Hamilton-Brackett Memorial Award (1979), the Dedalus Award (1983), and the Skylark Award (1985).
Jack L. Chalker
"I have no incentive, economic or otherwise, to collaborate with anyone."
The boy of Baltimore. Jack never really grew up...but he gave it a shot. Attended B. S. Towson State College and held graduate degrees from John Hopkins. Majors were History and English. Taught school for a while, and lectured about Science Fiction and related technologies in colleges and universities, and even the Smithsonian (where words drop to the floor and walk out of the building on their own). He hobbied at publishing, and dearly loved it, founding, as a teen-ager, The Mirage Press. And had his share of odd jobs and military service.
Jack only wrote enough short stories to make up a single collection, 1988's Dance Band on the Titanic.
Chalker was a novelist, at least 54, and wrote about equally in the Fantasy & Science Fiction fields. He seldom wrote just one novel, usually a trilogy, but often a super-series. Notable trilogies were The Changewinds, The Quintara Marathon, and the Three Kings. His super-series ran from the five novels of the Soul Rider to seven novels of The Well of Souls. The line between Science Fiction and Fantasy often blurred in Chalker's work, and he occasionally created a disguised mystery. It was fun for him.
Every rule has an exception (including the scientific ones)...Jack did collaborate with Mark Owings on The Science Fantasy Publishers (1991), published and annually updated by his Mirage Press.
[Editor ASIDE: I began writing to Jack in 1960 and '61. I met him for the first time at a Lunacon in 1962 where we were both guest panelists. He'd taken the bus up from Baltimore and walked to the con, hadn't eaten, so my wife and I took him across the street to a lunch counter. I was impressed by Jack's performance at the Lunacon. He wore a suit and looked much older than his 17 years. He had carefully thought out one of Sam's silly topics and made a deliberate and persuasive argument. We drifted apart in life after that, coming together again in the computer age of web site building. But we represented two entirely different concepts of the universe, so took to arguing almost immediately. And that was that. The quote below comes from those letters and is in reference to his scientific belief in the Big Bang theory. But we kept an eye on each other's work. I am sorry to see him go before his last project was completed. I was afraid this would happen after I saw his weight in one of Patti Perret's photographs in The Faces of Science Fiction. GCW]
"Science isn't a belief system, it's based on evidence and testing. Refusing
to accept what keeps coming up is more in the area of religion than anything else, and beyond the rational."
[Ah, Jack, I wish you hadn't died so soon. You missed the part where you were wrong --- August 7, 2006 "A project aiming to create an easier way to measure cosmic distances has instead turned up surprising evidence that our large and ancient universe might be even bigger and older than previously thought. If accurate, the finding would be difficult to mesh with current thinking about how the universe evolved." So much for religious thought...on either side of the equations. GCW]
PEN NAMES:
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Mine here.
ON-LINE BIOGRAPHY: Jack L. Chalker home page
OBITUARY: Contra Costa Times
