Author Biography and Bibliography

H. Chandler Davis, usually known as Chandler or Chan, was born in 1926 to a couple of dissident intellectuals, Horace B. Davis and Marian Rubins Davis, who, during some of his formative years—including the years when he became devoted to science-fiction—were both teaching at Simmons College in Boston. Davis proceeded rather rapidly to make a start as a mathematician and as a writer; several of his stories appeared in Astounding Science Fiction between 1946 and 1950, and he got his PhD in mathematics at Harvard in 1950. The science-fiction productivity declined after a few years, but the scientific work continues to this day, as does Davis's political commitment.

Beside writing hortatory screeds, which he believes are quite on a level with his sf or his scientific works, he is also what used to be called a "Jimmy Higgins," after the idealized Socialist Party worker: he plugs along sitting at organizing meetings, stuffing envelopes, and all that. To this day, his political activism has sometimes landed him in hot water (in that, too, he takes after his parents). In particular, Davis's noncooperative stance when called by the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1954 earned him a prison term and rendered him permanently unemployable (at least in tenure-track professorial positions) in the USA. In this sense, it is fair to call him a refugee. In another sense, it is absurd to say that, it is overdramatizing, because the position to which Davis fled, a permanent professorship at the University of Toronto, was about as fine a position to settle down in as he could have wanted.

Davis has been married since 1948 to Natalie Zemon Davis, a historian. Their children, Aaron (musician), Hannah (anthropologist-writer), and Simone (feminist historian), are embellishing the family name.

Science fiction for Davis has not been merely a spark that burned brightly for a few years. His thinking on the world and the future is interwoven with science fiction, even in years when he wrote none of it and read less than he used to. And his whole life is lived in the wake of his friendships with Theodore Sturgeon, Phil Klass, Judith Merril, Jim Blish, Milton Rothman, Fred Pohl, Virginia Kidd, and the rest.





Photo by Bob Kalmbach.