James White (author) - Biography

Biography

James White was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, on 7 April 1928, and spent part of his early life in Canada. He was educated in Belfast at St. John's Primary School (1935 – 1941) and St. Joseph's Technical Secondary School (1942 – 1943). As a teenager he lived with foster parents. He wanted to study medicine but financial circumstances prevented this. Between 1943 and 1965 he worked for several Belfast tailoring firms and then as assistant manager of a Co-op department store. He married Margaret ("Peggy") Sarah Martin, another science fiction fan, in 1955 and the couple had three children: daughter Patricia, and sons Martin and Peter. White later worked for the aeroplane builders Short Brothers Ltd. as a technical clerk (1965 – 1966), publicity assistant (1966 – 1968), and publicity officer (1968 – 1984).

He became a science fiction fan in 1941, attracted particularly by the works of E. E. "Doc" Smith, which featured good aliens as well as evil ones, and of Robert A. Heinlein, many of whose stories center round ordinary people. In 1947 he met another Irish fan, Walter A. ("Walt") Willis (1919 – 1999), and the two helped to produce the magazines Slant (1948 – 1953) and Hyphen (1952 – 1965), which featured stories and articles by noted authors including John Brunner, A. Bertram Chandler, and Bob Shaw. In 2004 both White and Willis were nominated for the retrospective Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer of 1953, although neither won. White said that he started writing stories because the Slant team felt that Astounding Science Fiction was too dominated by prophesies of nuclear doom, and his friends dared him to write the kind of story that they all liked to read. He said that getting published was fairly easy in the 1950s, as the World War II restrictions on paper were lifted, and there were at least 12 science magazines in Britain and about 40 in the United States. His first published short story, Assisted Passage, a parody of 1950s Anglo-Australian emigration policies, appeared in the January, 1953 edition of New Worlds. Further stories appeared in New Worlds over the next few years, but White's attempt to break into the more lucrative American market by submitting stories to Astounding Science Fiction stalled after the publication of The Scavengers. White later said that his optimistic view of inter-species relations was unpalatable to Astounding's xenophobic editor, John W. Campbell. As a result White's work was little-known outside the UK until the 1960s.

In 1957, Ace Books published White's first novel, The Secret Visitors, which included locations in Northern Ireland. The book had previously been serialized in New Worlds under the title Tourist Planet. Ace Books' science fiction editor, Donald A. Wollheim, thought the original ending was too tame and suggest that White should insert an all-out space battle just after the climactic courtroom scene. In November the same year New Worlds published White's novelette Sector General, and editor John ("Ted") Carnell requested more stories set in the same universe, founding the series for which White is best known. White gained "a steady following" for his "scientifically accurate" stories, which were notable examples of hard science fiction in New Worlds, despite the magazine's promotion of literary "New Wave" science fiction in the 1960s.

White kept up his day job with Short Brothers and wrote in the evenings, as his stories did not make enough money for him to become a full-time author. In 1980 he taught a literature course at a Belfast branch of the Workers Educational Association. When diabetes had severely impaired his eyesight, he took early retirement in 1984 and moved to the north Antrim resort town of Portstewart, where he continued to write. For many years he was a Council Member of the British Science Fiction Association and, with Harry Harrison and Anne McCaffrey, a Patron of the Irish Science Fiction Association. White was also a strong pacifist. He died of a stroke on 23 August 1999, while his novels Double Contact and The First Protector (Earth: Final Conflict) were being prepared for publication. His wife Peggy, son Martin, and daughter Patricia survived him.