Kris Neville
| Kris Ottman Neville | |
|---|---|
| Born | May 9, 1925 St. Louis |
| Died | December 23, 1980 (aged 55) |
| Pen name | Henderson Starke |
| Occupation | novelist, short story writer, journalist |
| Nationality | United States |
| Period | 1949–1976 |
| Genre | Science fiction |
Kris Ottman Neville (May 9, 1925 – December 23, 1980) was an American science fiction writer from California.
He was born in St. Louis. His first science fiction work was published in 1949. His most famous work, the novella Bettyann, is considered a classic of science fiction.
Well known science fiction writer and critic, Barry N. Malzberg, wrote the following biographical note about Kris Neville in his introduction to Neville's story Ballenger's People in the 1979 Doubleday collection Neglected Visions:
Kris Neville could have been among the ten most honored science fiction writers of his generation; instead, he virtually abandoned the field after conquering it early on and made himself the leading lay authority in the world on epoxy resins, collaborating on a series of specialized texts that have become the basic works in their field. I can hardly blame him for this decision, and it was in any case carefully thought out. Neville, who sold his first story in 1949 and another fifteen by 1952, concluded early on that the perimeters of the field in the 1950s were simply too close to contain the kind of work he would have to do if he wanted to grow as a writer, and accordingly he quit. A scattering of stories has appeared over the last quarter of a century, and a couple of novels, but except for one abortive attempt to write full-time in the mid-1960s (the field simply could not absorb the kind of work he was doing), Neville has been in a state of diminished production for a long time. Nowadays a short-short story shows up once a year or so in a magazine or original anthology; sometimes written in collaboration with his second wife, Lil, and always so astonishingly above the run of material surrounding it as to constitute an embarrassment to the other writers. Neville, whom I do not claim to know well at all but with whom I did correspond prolifically some years ago, may be among the most intelligent of science fiction writers (only A. J. Budrys seems to have his eclecticism and his breadth) and strikes me as among the few contented people I have ever known. ... Neville has done some extraordinary political satire – The Price of Simeryl, published way back in 1966, is an early, savage anti-Vietnam piece – and in work like New Apples in the Garden manifests an extraordinary range of subject and character.
Shortly after Neville's death in 1980, a remembrance by Malzberg was published in Locus Magazine, and later re-published in The Science Fiction of Kris Neville (Southern Illinois University Press, 1984.) It includes these additional observations:
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