Career
In 1941, Tucker published his first professional short story, "Interstellar Way Station." Between 1941 and 1979, he produced 25 science fiction short stories. He also turned his attention to writing novels, with 11 mystery novels and a dozen science fiction novels to his credit.
His most famous novel may be The Year of the Quiet Sun (1970), which won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award and was nominated for the Nebula Award.
In 1996, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) made Tucker its second Author Emeritus. In 2003, Tucker was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame, which was later renamed the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame.
Other notable books include The Lincoln Hunters, in which time-travellers from an oppressive future society seek to record Abraham Lincoln's "lost speech" of May 19, 1856. It contains a vivid description of Lincoln and his time, seen through the eyes of a future American who feels that Lincoln and his time compare very favorably with the traveler's own.
The Long Loud Silence (1952) is a post-apocalypse story in which the eastern third of the United States is quarantined as the result of an atomic and bacteriological attack. Damon Knight called it "a phenomenally good book; in its own terms, it comes as near perfection as makes no difference."
Much of Tucker's short fiction was collected in The Best of Wilson Tucker (1982).
Tucker was noted for using the names of friends in his fiction, to the point where the literary term for doing so is tuckerization.
Read more about this topic: Wilson Tucker
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