Goodbye, William F. Nolan

I got the word today that genre legend William F. Nolan had passed away. My first thought was that the field has lost another giant. My second was more sobering.

I realized that William F. Nolan was the very last of the authors whose works I cherished from my youth. I can't think of another one who's left.

I watched them all go. Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl, Harlan Ellison, Robert Bloch, Richard Matheson, Ray Bradbury, Jack Williamson, Clifford D. Simak. And later, the writers I came to love in my young adulthood., like Charles L. Grant, Rick Hautala, Dennis Etchison, T.M. Wright, Ray Russell, Jack Ketchum, and Richard Laymon.

Nolan was one of the fabled writers known as "The Group". This loose organization consisted of luminaries like Richard Matheson, Charles Beaumont, Ray Bradbury, and George Clayton Johnson.

Most will remember William F. Nolan for Logan's Run, a collaboration with George Clayton Johnson. It was successfully made into a good movie and the novel spawned sequels and comic adaptations. Nolan wrote nonfiction, works for the screen, and poetry, but as far as I am concerned he shined brightest with short stories.

Other than Logan's Run, Nolan is probably most famous to movie fans for his screenplay for the Robert Marasco novel, Burnt Offerings.

His collections are wonderful: Impact-20, Night Shapes, Things Beyond Midnight, and Like a Dead Man Walking and Other Shadow Tales.

William F. Nolan was always there, a presence in the genre and in my own life. I won't lie and claim that he was as important to me as Heinlein or Matheson, but he was a damned good writer whose work I always, always looked forward to.

Now he's gone. The last of them. It's hitting me pretty hard. I never met the man, but I felt that I knew him. I certainly knew and revered his work.

I've been pondering mortality lately anyway. I recently turned sixty. My brother passed away fifteen years ago, and his birthday is this week. Rick's death hit me harder than any other so far in my life.

I think of how we will be losing King, Straub, Farris, Campbell. It hurts. I've cared more for these people than most I've known in my life.

I'll snap out of it. I always do. It's just hard to contemplate how my youthful literary heroes are now all gone.


Written by Mark Sieber