Today is June 27, and it is the birthday of three writers: Robert Aickman (1914-1981), James P. Hogoan (1941-2010), and Mary Rosenblum (1952-2018). Let’s take a breief look at each of them.

Robert Aickman is probably the writer who has best stood the test of time of these three. He wrote ghost stories, or ghost story-adjacent stories, and is one of the best-regarded practitioner of those tales. His work is still in print. He referred to his work as strange stories.

Aickman’s stories often concern men and women who find themselves in strange situations without really understanding how they got there. He was primarily a short fiction writer, especially at novellette length. He onlyl wrote three novels, and two of  those were published posthumously. Collections of his work have continued to be published decades after his death.

James P. Hogan was about as different a writer from Robert Aickman as he could be. For one thing, Hogan wrote hard science fiction.  For another, Aickman’s stories were character driven stories. Characterization was arguably the weakest thing about Hogan’s writing. While Hogan did write some short fiction, most of his output was novels, beginning with Inherit the Stars in 1977.

Hogan was something of a contrarian in that he didn’t take settled science as a given. He examined the evidence and followed it where it led him. I heard him say at a convention a year or two before he died t hat he had been approached by a group of astronomers who had an alternative model that didn’t rely on dark matter or dark energy but instead claimed that the observations those models were based on could be explained by electromagnetic effects. The astronomers couldn’t get their ideas published because they were questioning the status quo. (This happens in science more than you might think.) Knowing Hogan’s work, they were wanting him to write a book about their model. Sadly, he passed away before that book could be written. I would have loved to read it. There’s no telling what Hogan would have had to say about COVID.

Hogan was easily approachable at science fiction conventions, and I wish I had taken advantage of that the few tiems I met him.

Mary Rosenblum is the least known and least prolific of the writers profiled today.  I can hear some of you in the back saying, “Mary who?”

Mary Rosenblum began publishing short fiction in the early nineties. She wrote three short stories and a novel in a series called The Drylands, with the novel having the same title. I read it at the time and quite enjoyoed. I enjhoyed it enough to get her next two novels.

Then the novels stopped. I’m not sure why. Sales numbers, maybe. She continued to writer short fiction for the rest of the decaqde and throught eh first decade of the Twenty-First Century. At some point she began writing mysteries with a floral theme. There was one final science fiction novel, Horizons, in 2006. She published almost nothing during the last decade of her life.

I think I met her at a science fiction convention, probably Armadillocon, in the early nineties.

Mary Rosenblum was also a cheesemaker  who taught the craft. She died when a small plane whe was pilooting crashed. I hadn’t realized she had died until this afternoon when I checked the ISFDB for birthdays.