Jack Dann
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Jack Dann (born February 15, 1945) is an American science fiction writer living in Australia.
Dann began publishing science fiction in 1970 with the stories "Dark, Dark the Dead Star" and "Traps," both of which appeared in the Ejler Jakobsson-edited Worlds of If and were collaborations with George Zebrowski. Since then, Dann has written or edited over seventy books, including the groundbreaking novels Junction, Starhiker, The Man Who Melted, The Memory Cathedral—which is an international bestseller, the Civil War novel The Silent, and Bad Medicine, which has been compared to the works of Jack Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson and called "the best road novel since the Easy Rider days."[citation needed]
Dann’s work has been compared to Jorge Luis Borges, Roald Dahl, Lewis Carroll, Carlos Castaneda, J. G. Ballard, Mark Twain, and Philip K. Dick. Dick, author of the stories from which the films "Blade Runner" and "Total Recall" were made, wrote that "Junction is where Ursula Le Guin’s Lathe of Heaven and Tony Boucher’s 'The Quest for Saint Aquin' meet...and yet it’s an entirely new novel.... I may very well be basing some of my future work on Junction."[citation needed] Best selling author Marion Zimmer Bradley called Starhiker "a superb book...it will not give up all its delights, all its perfections, on one reading."[citation needed]
Library Journal has called Dann "...a true poet who can create pictures with a few perfect words."[citation needed] Roger Zelazny thought he was a reality magician and Best Sellers has said that "Jack Dann is a mind-warlock whose magicks will confound, disorient, shock, and delight."[citation needed] The Washington Post Book World compared his novel The Man Who Melted with Ingmar Bergman’s film "The Seventh Seal".[citation needed]
His books have been translated into thirteen languages, and his short stories have appeared in Omni and Playboy and other major magazines and anthologies. He is the editor of the anthology Wandering Stars, one of the most acclaimed American anthologies of the 1970’s, and several other well-known anthologies such as More Wandering Stars. Dann also edits the multi-volume Magic Tales series with Gardner Dozois and is a consulting editor Tor Books.
He is a recipient of the Nebula Award, the Australian Aurealis Award (twice), the Ditmar Award (three times), the World Fantasy Award, the Peter McNamara Achievement Award, and the Premios Gilgamés de Narrativa Fantastica award. Dann has also been honoured by the Mark Twain Society (Esteemed Knight).
High Steel, a novel co-authored with Jack C. Haldeman II, was published in 1993 by Tor Books. Critic John Clute called it "a predator...a cat with blazing eyes gorging on the good meat of genre. It is most highly recommended."[citation needed] A sequel entitled Ghost Dance is in progress.
Dann’s major historical novel about Leonardo da Vinci—entitled The Memory Cathedral—was first published by Bantam Books in December 1995 to rave reviews. It has been published in ten languages to date. It won the Australian Aurealis Award in 1997, was #1 on The Age bestseller list, and a story based on the novel was awarded the Nebula Award. The Memory Cathedral was also shortlisted for the Audio Book of the Year, which was part of the 1998 Braille & Talking Book Library Awards.
Morgan Llwelyn called The Memory Cathedral "a book to cherish, a validation of the novelist’s art and fully worthy of its extraordinary subject."[citation needed] The San Francisco Chronicle called it "A grand accomplishment,"[citation needed] Kirkus Reviews thought it was "An impressive accomplishment,"[citation needed] and True Review said, "Read this important novel, be challenged by it; you literally haven’t seen anything like it."[citation needed]
Dann’s novel about the American Civil War, The Silent, has been published by Bantam in the U. S., Lübbe in Germany, and HarperCollins in Australia. Library Journal chose it as one of their "Hot Picks" and wrote: "This is narrative storytelling at its best—so highly charged emotionally as to constitute a kind of poetry from hell. Most emphatically recommended."[citation needed] Peter Straub said "This tale of America’s greatest trauma is full of mystery, wonder, and the kind of narrative inventiveness that makes other novelists want to hide under the bed."[citation needed] And The Australian called it "an extraordinary achievement."[citation needed]
His novel Bad Medicine (titled Counting Coup in the U. S.), a contemporary road novel, has been described by The Courier Mail as "perhaps the best road novel since the Easy Rider Days."[citation needed]
Dann is also the co-editor (with Janeen Webb) of the groundbreaking Australian anthology Dreaming Down-Under, which Peter Goldsworthy has called "the biggest, boldest, most controversial collection of original fiction ever published in Australia."[citation needed] It has won Australia’s Ditmar Award and is the first Australian book ever to win the prestigious World Fantasy Award. His recent anthology Gathering the Bones, of which he is a co-editor, is included in Library Journal's Best Genre Fiction of 2003 and has been shortlisted for The World Fantasy Award.
Dann’s stories have been collected in Timetipping, Visitations, and the retrospective short story collection Jubilee: the Essential Jack Dann. The West Australian said it was "Sometimes frightening, sometimes funny, erudite, inventive, beautifully written and always intriguing. Jubilee is a celebration of the talent of a remarkable storyteller."[citation needed] His collaborative stories can be found in the collection The Fiction Factory.
Dann’s latest novel , The Rebel: an Imagined Life of James Dean is published by HarperCollins Flamingo in Australia and Morrow in the U.S. The West Australian called it "an amazingly evocative and utterly convincing picture of the era, down to details of the smells and sensations—and even more importantly, the way of thinking."[citation needed] Locus wrote: "The Rebel is a significant and very gripping novel, a welcome addition to Jack Dann’s growing oeuvre of speculative historical novels, sustaining further his long-standing contemplation of the modalities of myth and memory. This is alternate history with passion and difference."[citation needed]
As part of its Bibliographies of Modern Authors Series, The Borgo Press has published an annotated bibliography & guide entitled The Work of Jack Dann. An updated second edition is in progress. Dann is also listed in Contemporary Authors and the Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series; The International Authors and Writers Who’s Who; Personalities of America; Men of Achievement; Who’s Who in Writers, Editors, and Poets, United States and Canada; Dictionary of International Biography; the Directory of Distinguished Americans; Outstanding Writers of the 20th Century; and Who’s Who in the World.
Dann is also known for writing the book that gave the name to the game The Man Who Melted Jack Dann, a game where you place an author's name in front or behind the title of one of that author's books in order to see if you get a funny sentence.
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