Walling, William
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1926-2021) US aerospace engineer, technical writer and fiction author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Rings on her Fingers" in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction for September 1970; further stories followed in the same magazine, in Galaxy and in Analog. In his first sf novel, No One Goes There Now (1971), a distorted human culture on a colony planet (see Colonization of Other Worlds) finds itself confronting Aliens who will not abide our games of violence. The novel-length serial "Earth, Air, Fire and Water" (February-April 1974 Analog) with Stephen Nemeth deals with a Near Future human conspiracy to steal the Earth's atmosphere, using vast compressors (with a US subway project as camouflage) to store the air in ultra-dense form – distantly anticipating later and more benign plans for carbon dioxide sequestration by physical means as a Climate Change countermeasure; this implausible tale never saw book publication. The World I Left Behind Me (1979) lightheartedly describes a race to develop interstellar Space Flight, complicated by more aliens and other impediments.
This author should not be confused with the academic critic William A Walling, author of the Mary Shelley study Mary Shelley (1972). [JC/DRL]
William Herbert Walling
born Denver, Colorado: 25 November 1926
died Santa Barbara, California: January 2021
works
- No One Goes There Now (Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Company, 1971) [hb/Marvin Mattelson]
- The World I Left Behind Me (New York: St Martin's Press, 1979) [hb/Irv Freeman]
links
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