Brian Stableford, author of over 100 works and translator of over 200, passed away in Swansea Wales on February 24, 2024.
Stableford was born on July 25, 1948 in Shipley, Yorkshire, a place he described in a 2011 interview with Locus Magazine as being “renowned for pig-headed obstinacy, not suffering fools gladly, and the vanity of assuming that there very few people in the world who are not fools.”
Stableford, no fool himself, received a biology degree from the University of York in 1969 and in 1979 received a doctorate on the sociology of science fiction. He published his first story, “Beyond Time’s Aegis,” in 1965 with his friend, Craig A. Mackintosh, and published his first novel, Cradle of the Sun, in 1969. From there, he went on to pen an impressive number of books, including “Les Fleurs du Mal,” which received a Hugo nomination for Best Novella in 1995, and his science fiction vampire novel, The Empire of Fear, which won the Lord Ruthven Award in 1989.
In 1999, the Science Fiction Research Association presented him with the Pilgrim Award (now known as the SFRA Award for Lifetime Contributions to SF Scholarship) for his contribution to science fiction.
In more recent decades, he also translated hundreds of works of French proto-science fiction. “I’ve been trying to translate as much as I can, as fast as I can (racing against the gradual deterioration of my eyesight), in the hope of getting the bulk of the job done in time to cultivate a general appreciation of the pattern,” he told Locus in 2011. In that year, he was also awarded the inaugural Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Special Award for his contributions.
Stableford is survived by his children.
