George Alec Effinger – 50th Reunion Essay

George Alec Effinger

Date of Death: 26-Apr-2002

College: Branford

(This obituary was published on TheGuardian.com and was reprinted on the Class Website.)

George Alec Effinger was one of science fiction’s most humorous and eclectic writers. He burst into the field in the early 1970s, with a style that echoed the irreverence of the times. His first novel, What Entropy Means To Me (1972), drew as much on the knowing postmodernism of Thomas Pynchon as on the new wave of Thomas Disch or Philip K. Dick; it was a playfully, self-aware blend of space opera, quantum mechanics, and Lawrence Sterne.

If Effinger never fulfilled his promise, it was at least partly for physiological reasons; he suffered from intestinal ulcers, and was plagued by inferior medical care, misdiagnoses, and battles against addictions to prescription painkillers and alcohol. It is no coincidence that, despite producing nearly 20 novels, much of his best work was done in the short-story format.

Effinger was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and went to Yale University, intending to study medicine. He was deterred by organic chemistry, and moved to New York, where his first wife babysat for the science-fiction writing couple, Damon Knight and Kate Wilhelm. He joined their Clarion Writers’ Workshop, and some of his first stories were published in the first Clarion anthology in 1971. His impact was immediate. The following year, “Entropy” was nominated for a Nebula Award, and his story “All the Last Wars at Once” was nominated for a Hugo.

Effinger moved to New Orleans, becoming an expert on Mardi Gras traditions. He used the southern Louisiana bayous as the setting for his non-scifi novel Felicia (1976), perhaps the best of his next books, which seemed to fall short of the high standard set by his first. His stories, often surrealy funny, continued to appear in a wide variety of magazines, including Playboy. He also wrote four novels based on the Planet of the Apes films.

A renaissance of sorts took place in the 1980s, particularly a trilogy of novels beginning with When Gravity Fails (1987), featuring a character named Marid Audran and set in an Islamic future city called the Budayeen, recognizably based on New Orleans. Drawing on the vision of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, Effinger combined elements of cyberpunk fiction with the style of hardboiled detective writing, helping to create a sub-genre of its own.

The novel was again nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula awards. The following year, he won both awards, and the Theodore Sturgeon Award, for his short story “Schrödinger’s Kitten”, another playful takeoff on quantum physics.

He wrote scenarios for computer and role-playing games, successfully adapting the Audran books. He wrote a Sherlock Holmes novel, featuring Dr. Fu Manchu, which those who have read the original insist was some of his finest work.

He moved briefly to Los Angeles in 1998, when he was married for the third time, to science fiction writer Barbara Hambly, but he returned to New Orleans after their divorce two years later. He was a collector of glass from the depression era, and a sports enthusiast. Sports figure in many of his stories, most memorably the gridiron takeoff, “25 Crunch Split Right on Two.”