Richard Bowes

Richard Dirrane Bowes (January 8, 1944 – December 24, 2023) was an American author described as an "urban fantasist" whose stories tended to be "set in, and to evoke, a congested, magically altered New York." He won two World Fantasy Awards for his short fiction along with the Lambda Award for his 1999 mosaic novel Minions of the Moon. He was also an eight-time finalist for the Nebula Award, including for his often-reprinted short story "There's a Hole in the City."

Biography Richard Bowes was born January 8, 1944, to an Irish-Catholic family in Boston, Massachusetts. In an interview, Bowes said that his parents were both actors and that some of his great uncles were writers. His younger brother is the artist David Bowes. He attended school both in Boston and later in Long Island, New York, where he occasionally went on drug and alcohol binges. Bowes also had a "contentious, tragic relationship" with his father. Bowes later became an antique toy dealer, designed boardgames, and worked as a reference librarian at New York University.

Called "the consummate New Yorker" by Jeffrey Ford, Feral Cell and Goblin Market.

In 1992, Bowes began writing a series of semi-autobiographical stories narrated by Kevin Grierson. These stories were published primarily in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (F&SF), and later became the novel Minions of the Moon. One story, "Streetcar Dreams," won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novella in 1998. The novel itself won the Lambda Literary Award in 2000.

A short fiction collection, Transfigured Night and Other Stories, was published by Time Warner in 2001. It included the original novella "My Life in Speculative Fiction," a semi-autobiographical "gay coming-of-age story with sci-fi tinges" that "follows a confused college kid in the early '60s as he grapples with issues of family, politics, and sexuality." These stories plus recent material appeared in Streetcar Dreams and Other Midnight Fancies from England's PS Publishing in 2006.

During his later years, Bowes wrote a series of stories about time travelers interacting with ancient Greek gods, which formed the mosaic novel From the Files of the Time Rangers, published in 2005 by Golden Gryphon Press. As with Bowes' earlier novel Minions of the Moon, these stories were also semi-autobiographical and narrated by the character of Kevin Grierson. The story ran in the December 2009 edition of F&SF.

In 2013 Bowes published the novel/story cycle Dust Devils on a Quiet Street, about a group of writers in New York City before, during, and after the September 11 attacks. Dust Devils appeared on the World Fantasy and Lambda Award short lists.

Bowes' stories have been described by The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction as reading like "highly sophisticated Urban Fantasy" In response to this categorizing, Bowes speculated that he simply "made less distinction than some writers do between my reality and my imagination." Elizabeth Hand called the story a "sly cautionary tale (that) should become required reading for any struggling artist or writer."

Analysis of New York City in Stories

New York City is a frequent setting for many of Bowes' stories. According to Joshua Rothman in The New Yorker, "the story puts 9/11 in the context of New York's long municipal history of death and grief, and literalizes the haunted feeling one has near Ground Zero."