Kris Neville

Kris Ottman Neville (1925 - 1980) was an American science fiction writer from California. He was born in St. Louis. His first science fiction work was published in 1949. His most famous work, the novella Bettyann, is considered a classic of science fiction. "I never met Kris Neville. I collaborated with him on three short stories and an abortive novel and spoke to him on the telephone five to ten times. What I did was correspond with him for over a decade starting in 1969 and there must exist...See more

Kris Ottman Neville (1925 - 1980) was an American science fiction writer from California. He was born in St. Louis. His first science fiction work was published in 1949. His most famous work, the novella Bettyann, is considered a classic of science fiction. "I never met Kris Neville. I collaborated with him on three short stories and an abortive novel and spoke to him on the telephone five to ten times. What I did was correspond with him for over a decade starting in 1969 and there must exist in my files somewhere at least 200,000 words of Nevilliliana .... I could not divest myself of any of these letters because what they are the lucid and balanced evidence of a powerful mind focused by a powerful soul who inch by inch had worked his way through to a purifying and terrible clarity of vision ... that a serious literary career was impossible in science fiction (impossible out of it too because there was simply no audience left for 'serious' fiction in this country.) The limitations of the audience and the limitations of editing made no writer capable of doing an ambitious and improving body of work which would reach an audience and take that audience along. Neville ascribed virtually every failure in the modern history of the genre to meretricious, debased, or cowardly editors, not to the writers ..." -- Neville biographer Barry N. Malzberg See less