Terry Bisson

Terry Ballantine Bisson (February 12, 1942 – January 10, 2024) was an American science fiction and fantasy author.

He was best known for his short stories, including "Bears Discover Fire", which won the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award, and "They're Made Out of Meat".

Terry Ballantine Bisson was born February 12, 1942, in Madisonville, Kentucky, and raised in Owensboro, Kentucky.

In the 1960s, early in his career, Bisson collaborated on several comic book stories with Clark Dimond, and he edited Major Publications' black-and-white horror-comics magazine Web of Horror, but left before the fourth issue.

Bisson's first novel was Wyrldmaker, a science fiction novel influenced by James Blish's The Seedling Stars.

While a student at Grinnell College (Iowa) in 1961, Bisson was one of a group of twelve students who traveled to Washington, D.C., during the Cuban Missile Crisis supporting U.S. President John F. Kennedy's "peace race".

Kennedy invited the group into the White House (the first time protesters had ever been so recognized) and they met for several hours with McGeorge Bundy.

The group received wide press coverage, and this event is regarded as the start of the student peace movement.

After leaving Grinnell College, Bisson graduated from the University of Louisville in 1964.

He became a "working" writer in 1981.

A self-identified member of the New Left, he operated Jacobin Books, a "revolutionary" mail-order book service, from 1985 to 1990, in partnership with Judy Jensen.

Bisson was married three times.

He and his first wife, Deirdre Holst, had three children.

His second marriage was to Mary Corey.

His next novel was Talking Man (1986), a fantasy about the titular wizard living in the contemporary American South.

In 1996, he wrote two three-part comic book adaptations of Nine Princes in Amber and The Guns of Avalon, the first two books in Roger Zelazny's Amber series.

In 1997, after Walter M. Miller, Jr.'s death in 1996, Bisson completed Miller's unfinished Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman, the sequel to Miller's classic 1960 novel A Canticle for Leibowitz.

Bisson died in the early morning on January 10, 2024, at the age of 81.

He lived "on and off" in New York City for most of the next four decades, before moving to Oakland, California, in 2002.

Bisson married his "longtime companion" Judy Jensen on December 24, 2004; the couple had one daughter, and Bisson was stepfather to Jensen's two children.