Logsdon, Syd
Entry updated 11 December 2023. Tagged: Author.
(1947- ) US teacher and author who began to publish work of genre interest with "To Go Not Gently" for Galaxy in June 1978 (see also below). His first sf novel, Jandrax (1979), is a Planetary Romance whose inhabitants, two generations after their Starship has been stranded, have created two contrasting societies on the planet: a "stationary" order governed by the passengers' version of a unifying Monomythos (see Religion); and a migratory culture created by the crew, after they have been exiled from their ship. Logsdon's second novel, A Fond Farewell to Dying (June 1978 Galaxy as "To Go Not Gently"; exp 1981), is a perhaps more interesting Ruined Earth tale set in twenty-third-century India, long after a nuclear World War Three has depopulated most of the rest of the world. A longstanding conflict with a Muslim nation to the north frames the humanly complex story of a Westerner's research into cloning (see Clones) to compensate for the post-nuclear sterilization suffered by most of the world. Though he is successful in the end, the sense that cloning barbarously parodies Hindu beliefs in Reincarnation permeates the text, whose very considerable competence makes Logsdon's many subsequent years of silence all the more regrettable. This silence was broken by the further Hard SF novel Cyan (2017), concerning the founding of an Earth colony on the titular world of the Procyon solar system (see Colonization of Other Worlds), and the various difficulties it faces. [JC]
Syd F Logsdon
born Claremore, Oklahoma: 10 December 1947
works
- Jandrax (New York: Ballantine Books/Del Rey, 1979) [pb/Doug Beekman]
- A Fond Farewell to Dying (New York: Pocket Books/Timescape, 1981) [short version first appeared June 1978 Galaxy as "To Go Not Gently": pb/Kevin Eugene Johnson]
- Cyan (Calgary, Alberta: Edge Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing, 2017) [pb/]
links
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