James H. Schmitz

James Henry Schmitz (October 15, 1911 – April 18, 1981) was a German-American science fiction writer.

Early life Schmitz was born in Hamburg, Germany to American parents and grew up speaking both English and German. The family spent World War I in the United States, then returned to Germany.

Schmitz traveled to Chicago in 1930 to go to business school, then switched to a correspondence course in journalism. Unable to find a job because of the Great Depression, he returned to Germany to work with his father's company. Schmitz lived in various German cities, where he worked for the International Harvester Company,

Writing career

Schmitz wrote mostly short stories, which sold chiefly to Galaxy Science Fiction and Astounding Science-Fiction (which later became Analog Science Fiction and Fact). Gale Biography in Context called him "a craftsmanlike writer who was a steady contributor to science fiction magazines for over 20 years."

His first published story was "Greenface", published in August 1943 in Unknown.

His story "Second Night of Summer", published in Galaxy Science Fiction in December 1950, features the first instance of the term "hive mind" in science fiction.

Most of his works are part of the "Hub" series and feature characters with telepathy. However, the novel that "is usually thought of as Schmitz's best work"

In an essay in the anthology The Good Old Stuff (1998), Dozois laments that the book Agent of Vega is "long out-of-print, alas, but one which – if you can find it – delivers as pure a jolt of Widescreen Space Opera Sense of wonder as can be found anywhere." However, the website Free Speculative Fiction Online freely offers Agent of Vega, along with several of Schmitz's other stories, including "Greenface", "Balanced Ecology", "Lion Loose", "Goblin Night", and many more.

Schmitz wrote the introduction to the concordance The Universes of E. E. Smith.

Legacy Gardner Dozois has said, in prefacing the Schmitz tale "The Second Night of Summer", in which humans on the planet Noorhut face an attack from aliens and are, unbeknownst to themselves, saved by the actions of a single woman with psi powers, Granny Wannattel, with the sole help of a friendly alien she calls her pony:

With his popular equality-between-the-sexes fiction, Schmitz eased the way for later writers such as Joanna Russ, James Tiptree, Jr., Kit Reed, Connie Willis, Sheri S. Tepper, and other science fiction authors who used female protagonists and feminine point-of-view more than half the time. Of "The Second Night of Summer", Dozois went on to write, "the hero of the piece is not only a woman, but an old woman ... a choice that most adventure writers wouldn't even make now, in 1998, let alone in 1950, which is when Schmitz made it!"

Mercedes Lackey places her first meeting with science fiction at age 10 or 11, when she happened to pick up her father's copy of James H. Schmitz's Agent of Vega.

Personal life During World War II, Schmitz served as an aerial photographer in the Pacific for the United States Army Air Forces. After the war, he took residence in California where he and his brother-in-law managed a business which manufactured trailers until they ended the business in 1949. Schmitz died of congestive lung failure in 1981 after a five-week stay in hospital in Los Angeles. He was survived by his wife, Betty Mae Chapman Schmitz.