Archives: The Science Fiction Hall of Fame

As a child in western Ohio in the 1930s, Edison Freeport Rickenbacker had absolutely no knowledge whatsoever of the popular pulp SF magazines - a fact that immediately marked him as unusual. Despite this, he independently came to the conclusion that his parents were from another planet and were raising him as food.

After running away to join the navy at the age of seventeen and experiencing the surreal nature of the military mind, he naturally was attracted to speculative literature, which he began to devour in abundance.

After the war he quickly trained in correspondence engineering while earning money as a speech writer for a crooked Senator from Delaware. In 1946 he combined these skills and began submitting stories to Amazing and Unknown. From his first published story, "The Reinforced Concrete Man". Rickenbacker won accolades for his narrative skill, his tight plots, and his knowledge of building materials. In quick succession followed "Fibro Cement Planet". "Help! I've Been Cantilevered!". "Alas, the Pylon" and the Hugo Award winning "Foundation and Roofing" (all 1949).

Rickenbacker began to extend himself into novel length presentations in the 1950s. The Interplanet Construction Co. (adapted from the prospectus of a failed company) was followed by The Moon is Very Far Away in 1954, Engineers in Paradise in 1955, the moving Mudbrick Hell in 1956, and the dystopian The Last of the Builders (U.S. Construction Contractors' Award, 1958).

The 1960s saw a change in Rickenbacker's writing — perhaps due to a reassessment of his life after the Korean War which ended before he could write a thinly veiled story about it. For a time (1960-63) he moved from Hard SF to what his fans called Too Hard SF, with several novels totally composed of schematics and blueprints and with only the barest attempts at characterisations.

He abandoned this approach in 1968 with the uncharacteristic The Permanent Hairdresser , a misguided attempt at a sociological novel concerned with a worldwide plague of narcissism. Later he admitted it was a misunderstanding of just what the New Wave actually was.

Rickenbacker's novels grew increasingly long, so much so that circus strongmen would opt for the New York Telephone Directory to rip in half rather than a Rickenbacker novel. His publishers feared he would attempt a trilogy - which would simply be unshippable.

E.Freeport Rickenbacker's output dwindled in the 1970s until his last novel - a slim 1200 pages - was published in a return to form in 1979. Simply titled Struts, it was a massive, yet moving, tale of a doughty engineer caught in a series of madcap adventures with time, space, ancestors and building materials.

E.Freeport Rickenbacker died in 1981.