Introduction
ROBERT F. YOUNG 1915–1985
YOUNG, LIKE HIS PRINCIPALS, IS AN INTERESTING and ultimately, perhaps, tragic figure. (Tragedy of course implies that the principal has had some height from which to fall; that’s arguable with Young.) His men struggle against nature, landscape, time, circumstance, and—his recurringly obsessive theme with which he is most identified—giantesses. His men are forced by landscape or by mythic object (like the World Tree, which is the central figure of The Last Yggdrasill, probably his best known novel) to some level of self-confrontation they cannot abide and, over and again, they fall away from that confrontation. Sometimes it is the soul which shrivels, sometimes it is the corpus itself: suicide through stubbornness and insistence is as common a theme as the giantesses. Again and again Young portends through the juxtaposition of unbearable or imponderable external force, again and again portent leads to destruction or flight. Infrequently does it lead to healing or accommodation. Young’s body of work is, perhaps, a paradigm of a haunted soul.
Perhaps not. The comparison of writer and work is almost impossible; Young is one of the least-known science fiction or fantasy writers of reputation. He published widely through the science fiction and fantasy markets and even in The Saturday Evening Post for well over thirty-five years; his first collection, The Worlds of Robert F. Young, was published in 1965 by Simon & Schuster (Young was one of the few science fiction writers who published through this mainstream, hardcover house), and yet he remained obscure, a mystery to the science fiction community and—one might infer from the stories—a mystery to himself. The Last Yggdrasil, that World-Tree novel, was optioned for a significant amount by the Disney Studios in the mid-1980s (the film, unfortunately, was never made), and his giantesses made enough of an impression upon the science fiction community to be the subject of parody here and there. However, unlike some of the writers to whom he could be compared (Jerry Sohl, Michael Shaara), mainstream writers who perched or landed in science fiction because their themes externally were science fiction, Young never had any audience outside of the genre and in the years since his death his work has been marginalized. This posthumous collection—only his third collection and the first in thirty-two years—can only contribute to the restoration of his reputation.
Young is an interesting and felicitous writer who—like a good many others—deserved and deserves more attention than he got; maybe this bothered him, maybe it didn’t. The stories imply fierce ambition and frustration but might themselves have been a release. His obituary in the science fiction news magazine Locus revealed a fact which was apparently unknown to everyone: Young had been a janitor in the Buffalo school system for decades, retiring only the year he died. A science-fiction-writing janitor? A science fiction writer compelled to employment as a janitor? As one an anomaly, as the other imponderable. All of us contain multitudes; the real landscape inside all of us makes the outer unconquerable.
Perhaps this was Young’s central point: We travel from and toward a central, inextinguishable mystery.
—Barry N. Malzberg
March 2001, inextinguishably