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For the football player of the same name see Bob Tucker (football player).

Arthur Wilson "Bob" Tucker (November 23, 1914 – October 6, 2006) was an American mystery, action adventure, and science fiction writer and fan. He did his fan writing under the name Bob Tucker, and is best known to the fan community under that name.

Tucker became involved in science fiction fandom in 1932 and in that decade began publishing a science fiction fanzine, The Planetoid. From 1938 to 1975, he published the fanzine Le Zombie (the title arising from the curious fact that on multiple occasions fallacious reports of his death were made within fandom), which lasted for more than sixty issues and later was revived as a webzine. He published the Bloomington News Letter from his home in Bloomington, Illinois which dealt with the writing field. Active in letter-writing as well, Tucker was long a popular fan, coining many phrases familiar in fandom. He was Fan Guest of Honor, Professional Guest of Honor, Toastmaster and/or MC at so many science fiction conventions that no-one has managed to compile a complete list, including Torcon I (the 1948 Worldcon); and NyCon3 (the 1967 Worldcon). In 1940 he served on the committee of the Second World Science Fiction Convention. In 1941, Tucker published his first short story, "Interstellar Way Station". Between 1941 and 1979 he produced twenty-five science fiction short stories. He also turned his attention to writing novels, with eleven 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. Although Tucker wrote more than twenty novels, both science fiction and mystery, he always viewed writing as an avocation instead of an occupation. He worked instead as a movie projectionist and theater electrician.

Tucker was also noted for using the names of fellow fans and other friends in his fiction, to the point where the literary term for doing so is now called tuckerization. Another term that Tucker originated, "space opera", is also in common use today^[1].

Tucker won the Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer in 1970 and the Retro-Hugo for same category in 1954. His Science Fiction Newsletter (a.k.a. Bloomington News Letter) won the Retro-Hugo Award for Best Fanzine in 1951. In 1996 SFWA made Tucker its second Author Emeritus. In 2003, Tucker was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame.

Much of his short fiction was collected in The Best of Wilson Tucker (1982).

The Lincoln Hunters, in which time-travellers from an oppressive future society seek to record Abraham Lincoln's "lost speech" of May 19, 1856, 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 traveller's own.

The Long Loud Silence, is an early seminal work on the effects of bio-hazard, in which one half of the United States is bitterly in strife against the pandemically infected other half.

• Wild Talent (1954)
• The Lincoln Hunters (1958)
• The Year of the Quiet Sun (1970)
• Ice and Iron (1974)

1. ^ Browning, T.G.. Stanley G. Weinbaum: SF Flare. Retrieved on 2006-09-06.

• Wilson Tucker Home Page
• Wilson Bob Tucker - Author and Fan with photo gallery of Tucker and page images of Tucker's fanzine Le Zombie
• Tucker obituary in The Independent
• SFWA Tucker obituary
• Wilson Tucker at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database