Tom Reamy (January 23, 1935 — November 4, 1977) was an American science fiction and fantasy author and a key figure in 1960s and 1970s science fiction fandom. He died prior to the publication of his first novel. His works are primarily dark fantasy.
He was born Thomas Earl Reamy in Woodson, Texas. While still in his teens in the early 1950s, he became active in science fiction fandom's fanzine and convention culture as both a fan writer and fan artist. During this period Reamy began to experiment with writing fantasy and science fiction. He was never quite satisfied with or confident enough to submit his stories to the editors of the professional genre magazines of the era, despite encouragement from friends and others who felt he had talent. Reamy continued to hone his writing for many years, while exploring other expressions for his growing creativity.
Reamy, along with transplanted Texan Orville Mosher, founded the first organized science fiction fan club in Texas: The Dallas Futurian Society (DFS), so named after the earlier New York Futurians. The DFS was founded in late fall of 1953, and the club was active until July 6, 1958, when it expired in a colorful fashion. During that active five-year period, Mosher and Reamy edited the club's fanzine CriFanAc, attracting a variety of contributors, both local and from greater science fiction fandom. He also contributed artwork and commentary to its pages.
With fellow Dallas Futurians Jim and Greg Benford, Reamy organized the first science fiction convention held in Texas. A rotating city and state regional convention of the era, Southwesterncon's sixth incarnation was held in Dallas on the weekend of July 5, 1958, concluding the next day, July 6. The professional guest of honor was new writer and well-known fan Marion Zimmer Bradley. Longtime science fiction fan personality, collector, and literary agent Forrest J Ackerman came from Los Angeles as a surprise attendee.
On the last day of the convention, the members of the Dallas Futurian Society, disbanded their club as part of Southwestercon VI's business meeting. During that meeting, club co-founder Orville Mosher, the man behind much of the club's behind-the-scenes intrigue and politics, was elected by club consensus as DFS' new president. Then just moments later, led by Reamy's motion, the same Dallas Futurian Society voted to officially disband itself. Some of the former DFS members went off to college after the club's demise, while others continued to gather socially for years, having dispensed with the fan politics that had divided them as a more formal science fiction club. Mosher was never heard from again. Greg Benford later moved to California, where he became a physicist and astronomer at the University of California, Irvine and an award-winning science fiction writer.
During the mid-to-late 1960s, while working as a technical illustrator for aerospace contractor Collins Radio at their Dallas branch, Reamy became the editor and publisher of Trumpet, a slickly produced fanzine. Between 1965 and 1969 ten issues appeared. In 1966, it received enough nominations for inclusion on that year's final Hugo Awards ballot. But Trumpet was ruled as being ineligible that year because it didn't meet the Hugo rule's minimum number of published issues requirement needed for nomination. In 1967 and then again in 1969, Trumpet made it on the final ballot in the Best Fanzine category for science fiction's Hugo Award.
In the late 1960s, Reamy also organized and became chairman of Dallas fandom's long-running "Big D in '73" bid to host the 31st World Science Fiction Convention. He also edited and designed the bid's official publication, The Dallascon Bulletin. Nothing like them had been produced by previous Worldcon bidders. Each issue's appearance polarized strong support for or against the Texas bid. Due to its widespread, free circulation, and the large amount of paid advertising it carried, Texas fans were sometimes accused of trying to buy a win for Dallas. Ultimately, the long-running Dallascon bid collapsed for complex reasons unrelated to this controversy, just a few months before 1973's site-selection vote was taken at the 1971 Worldcon in Boston. Toronto won the 31st Worldcon by default.
Early in the 1970s, Reamy became one of the founders of the Dallas area's Turkey City Writer's Workshop. Many new Texas genre writers emerged from this workshop, eventually giving birth in 1976 to the all-Texas original speculative fiction hardcover anthology, Lone Star Universe. The workshop continues to this day.
Reamy's high-profile Worldcon bid in science fiction fandom and its Dallascon Bulletin had a lasting impact: These and his issues of Trumpet led to the formation on July 3, 1971 of the long-running Kansas City Science Fiction and Fantasy Society (KaCSFFS) and several year's later, Kansas City's bid for the 1976 Worldcon. Many of Dallas' "Big Bid" concepts were adopted by KC and used in its multi-level bidding strategy. Reamy joined the Kansas City bid at chairman Ken Keller's request, shortly before KC's victory in 1974, filling two key department head positions for the 34th World Science Fiction Convention. The ill-fated Dallascon was reborn in Kansas City as MidAmeriCon.
Following his move to KC in the late summer of 1974, Reamy retired Trumpet and began publishing the similar Nickelodeon. There, with new business partner Ken Keller, he started a typesetting and graphic design business, Nickelodeon Graphics. Together, they created the publications division for KC's now official MidAmeriCon, the 34th World Science Fiction Convention. Reamy immediately established a strong editorial style and modern graphic design approach to the convention's progress reports and other publications. That included a first: a full-sized, hardcover program book, a concept left over from the old Dallascon bid. All of this had a permanent influence on all Worldcon publications that followed. Reamy was also the department head of the convention's ambitious film program department that developed another first: a comprehensive, 80-hour, all 35mm science fiction film retrospective within a World Science Fiction Convention. The concept included a movie theater-style concessions area that offered freshly popped popcorn, selections of soda, and candies.
In the early 1970s, having honed his writing craft quietly for many years, Reamy felt confident enough to begin submitting his fiction to the genre's magazines and original short story anthologies. He work began selling almost immediately.
Reamy's only novel Blind Voices, published posthumously in both hardcover and mass-market paperback editions, earned critical comparisons with the works of Richard Matheson, Ray Bradbury, and Harlan Ellison. The novel deals with the arrival of a strange and wonderful “freak show” at a rural town in Kansas during the 1920s and its effects on the lives of the residents. While not quite as polished as those authors’ works, critics regarded Blind Voices as an exceptional first novel, causing both fans and critics to ponder how important a figure he could have become if he had lived.
Other than Blind Voices, the only other book by Tom Reamy is a collection of his shorter fiction, San Diego Lightfoot Sue and Other Stories, also published posthumously in both hardcover and mass-market paperback. "San Diego Lightfoot Sue," the individual story, won science fiction's Nebula Award as the Best Novelette of 1975.
Only one original, 17,000 word Reamy story remains unpublished after all this time: "Potiphee, Petey and Me" will someday be published in Harlan Ellison's now infamous Last Dangerous Visions original anthology, the third and final book of that series.
Tom Reamy died a writer's death on November 4, 1977 [1] at age 42 while at his home in Independence, MO. He was found dead from a heart attack, slumped over his typewriter seven pages into a new, untitled story for editor Ed Ferman at The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. He was laid to rest in Woodson Cemetery, Woodson, Texas, where other members of the Reamy family were interred. Prior to his death, Reamy and artist George Barr had begun working again on their graphic novel adaptation of Poul Anderson’s fantasy novel The Broken Sword, which had begun appearing a decade before in the pages of Reamy's Trumpet. The project languished after his untimely death.
