One of the longest lived of the science fiction writers that were veterans of WWII, as well as the son of a minister. Born to outhouses and buried by computers. Or put another way . . . in like Jefferson - out like Orwell. It was a strain for all and writing served as a release and a therapy. As such, he was a loner, independent, driven, haunted . . . given to doing odd things and making unfathomable pronoucements at any time.

Fontenay entered the U.S. Army Air Corp in 1942, and as if that wasn't enough pressure, he married at the same time. He attended cryptographic school; went to OCS at Fort Washington, MD; worked in censorship for a while; transferred to the South Pacific for 30 months; and was posted to Guadalcanal and the Russell Islands. He received a commendation for teaching elementary Chinese and escaped alive in 1946 with the rank of Captain, retaining a lifelong interest in things oriental.

After the war, Scoop returned to Tennessee and worked his way up the ladder of applied newspaper journalism. He had always wanted to be a writer of fiction and did not see newspaper work as the same thing . . . so he could do interviews, research, travel, edit, or write all day to put out a newspaper and then write fiction at night without being burned out. But he was a busy man in many ways and had wide ranging interests that included holding a 3rd degree black belt in Tae Kwon Do, oil painting, authored Estes Kefauver: A Biography, earned certification as a clinical hypnotist, and tried to reconcile reality vs belief, which included his Epistle to the Babylonians: An Essay on the Natural Inequality of Man.

Fortenay's time as a science fiction writer was in two decades, widely separated; 1954-64 and the 1990s. In the early decade, his core work was in short fiction, while in the later decade his efforts were evenly distributed with the novels Target: Grant, 1862 and Modal sharing the spotlight with a noted teen-fiction series, "The Kipton Chronicles" of 18 novels, set on Mars with a young heroine. Several collections of his shorter works were published, The Collected Works of Charles L. Fontenay (1996) and Here, There and Elsewhen (2001). His most widely anthologized short story is "The Silk and the Song."

Objective writing, as a means to a subjective end, is basically of two types; 1) That which spells out everything, known or believed, often ad nauseum, and 2) That which twists facts into half-truths to affect a reader's mind and gain various types of control, be it political or religious (which has never been openly acceptable). The types run about 50/50 in today's society. As in the Hindu tale, Fontenay only showed you part of the elephant . . . but he had felt around the beast and had an overall idea of its nature. His years of service to America with integrity will be forgotten. That he will be remembered in fiction for the Kipton Chronicles is the wrapped enigma.

Blake Fontenay said,

"My father was definitely an individual. He did things his
own way and prided himself on standing out from the crowd."

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Mine here.

BIOGRAPHY: Fontenay's incomplete thumbnail bio in obit form.

OBITUARY: Here.

WWII DATA: Army SN 34362810. Name: Fontenay, Charles L. Res: Tennessee. Born: 1917, Brazil. Selectee: Ft Oglethorpe, Ga., Aug 1, 1942. Occupation: Reporter. Pvt. 4 years high school. Single. White.

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