Robert F. Young

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Robert Franklin Young, who published under the name Robert F. Young, was an American science fiction writer, who was born in 1915 and died in 1986. Except for the three and a half years he served in the Pacific during World War II, he spent most of his life in New York State. He owned a property on Lake Erie.

He remained little known by the public, in the USA as well as abroad. His career spanned more than thirty years, and he wrote fiction until he died. Only near the end of his life did the science fiction community learn he had been a janitor in the Buffalo public school system. Barry N. Malzberg noted: if he was a writer working as a janitor, he likely lived a frustrating life, but if he was a janitor who happened to write, he lived a surprising and triumphant one.

His production started in 1953 in Startling Stories, then Playboy, The Saturday Evening Post or Collier's. It mainly consisted in a long list of short stories with a poetic and romantic style that made him compared to Bradbury and Sturgeon. A good deal of these stories has been published in France by Galaxie, Fiction and the science fiction anthologies in the 'Livre de Poche'.

His most famous short stories are perhaps "The Dandelion Girl", which influenced the director of the anime series RahXephon, and "Little Dog Gone", which was nominated in 1965 for the Hugo Award for Best Short Story.