Photo: George Katechis [CC BY-SA 1.0], via Wikimedia Commons

With over 50 books
to his credit, Richard “Dick” A. Lupoff first rose to fame as the
co-editor (with his wife Pat) of the Hugo Award winning sci-fi
fanzine Xero, which helped to usher in comic book fandom and
featured many astonishing established and up-and-coming contributors
including Dan Adkins, ATom, Otto Binder, James Blish, L. Sprague de
Camp, Lin Carter, Avram Davidson, Roger Ebert, Harlan Ellison, Ron
Goulart, Larry Ivie, Roy Krenkel, Fred Pohl, Bill Schelly, Robert
Shea, Steve Stiles, Roy Thomas, Don Thompson, Maggie Thompson, Bob
Tucker, Donald Westlake, Ted White, Paul Williams, and Don Wollheim.
Pieces of the zine, which ran for only 10 issues form 1960-1963, were
collected in three Lupoff co-edited volumes:  All In Color For
a Dime (w Don Thompson), The Comic Book Book
(w Thompson), and THE BEST OF XERO (with Pat Lupoff).

In 1963, Lupoff
served as the reprint editor at Canaveral Press for the works of
Edgar Rice Burroughs. This lead to his first book, Edgar Rice
Burroughs: Master of Adventure and established
Lupoff as an expert on ERB. He later wrote Barsoom: Edgar Rice
Burroughs and The Martian Vision.

He has written over
30 novels. Among his best known are Circumpolar!,
Countersolar!, One Million Centuries, Into The
Aether, Space War Blues, Lovecraft’s Book, The
Comic Book Killer, Sun’s End, Buck Rogers In The 25th
Century (As by Addison E. Steele), The Black Tower, The
Emerald Cat Killer, and Rookie Blues.

Lupoff’s many
short stories have been collected into several books including The
Ova Hamlet Papers, Hyperprism / The Digital Wristwatch of
Philip K. Dick, Claremont Tales, Terrors, Deep
Space, and Dreamer’s Dozen. His tale “12:01 PM” was
adapted as the film 12:01.

All of us at Tachyon
wish the extraordinary Dick a healthy and happy birthday. May his A’s
manage to give him some joy in ‘18.

For more about THE
BEST OF XERO, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover by Larry Ivie