Kate Wilhelm

Award-winning author of science fiction and mystery novels

ate Wilhelm, a prolific, prizewinning author of science fiction and mystery novels, died on 8 March in Eugene, Oregon. She was 89.

In addition to writing, Wilhelm and her husband, author and editor Damon Knight, trained generations of writers through their Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop, and the annual Milford Writers’ Conference.

Wilhelm was one of the few women writing sci-fi under their own names in the 1960s, and her books quickly gained a following as well as awards.

Unlike many of her colleagues, she straddled genres, between futuristic fanta- sies and enigmatic mystery novels.she set her sci-fi in the near term and imposed present-day sensibilities. Her novels and short stories, influenced by socially relevant themes, were less about scientific advances than about the impact of those advances on human relationships.

She was born on 8 June 1928 in Dayton, Ohio. In 1947, she married Joseph Wilhelm. They had two sons before the marriage ended in divorce. Wilhelm married Knight, part of a wave of literary-minded sci-fi writers, in 1963. He died at 79 in 2002.

Wilhelm worked as a switchboard operator, a model and a clerk in a clothing store in Louisville and then raised her two sons on Star Lane, near the university’s hilltop observatory, which she regularly visited with them. Those visits opened her sights to a “wide universe”. She had always been a storyteller and a voracious reader, she said, and her other life-changing destination was the public library.

“I was a housewife with two young children,” she said, “and I’d been reading an anthology, and I put it down and said to myself, ‘I can do that’.”

Her first published work, in Fantastic magazine, was the story The Pint-sized Genie. Her first novel was a mystery, Morebitterthandeath(1963), and her first full-length work of sci-fi was The Clone (1965). Some 50 sci-fi books and 30 mystery novels followed.

A writer whose work flirted with infinity, Wilhelm was fixated on time. “Each and every one of us has to take it, forcibly if necessary, by wile, bribery, any method that works,” she wrote. “It’s hard in the beginning because there is no payback, no tangible reward for all that time spent alone in thought or at a keyboard, and life keeps getting in the way,” she added.

“But it is absolutely necessary to find the time and keep it inviolable and recognised by the private world of the writer that it is not to be invaded.” New York Times 2018.