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Endpoint: Alice K. Turner



created on: 29/09/2020
by: Lo55o (12474)
 
 

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General info :
Alice K. Turner (born Shenyang, China: 29 May 1939 - died January 17, 2015 in Manhatten, New York, USA (aged 75) was Playboy’s longtime fiction editor from 1980 to 2000.

Before her years at Playboy, she was an editor at New York Magazine and at Ballantine Books and then Paperback Editor and later Staff Writer at Publishers Weekly.

She nurtured fledgling authors and championed science fiction by publishing short stories that she said injected “some class” into the men’s magazine.

Ms. Turner had no illusions about why Playboy’s founder, Hugh Hefner, interspersed the magazine’s nude photos with serious fiction. She once recalled ruefully that in congratulating his centerfold models, Mr. Hefner said, “Without you, I would have had nothing but a literary magazine.”

Moreover, she said, the “ad sales guys” never appreciated fiction and would have “cut it out if they could, except for the fact that it adds certain respectability.”

But by sustaining that respectability for two decades, from 1980 to 2000, Ms. Turner helped keep literary short fiction on life support in the late 20th century, when few other publishers would or could. And writers like Terry Bisson, Ursula K. Le Guin, Joyce Carol Oates, Bob Shacochis, Robert Silverberg, Dan Simmons, John Updike and David Foster Wallace were not shy about having their words abut illustrations of naked women.

After her departure, Playboy's long-established hospitality to sf was much diminished. She edited two Anthologies of fiction from the magazine, of which The Playboy Book of Science Fiction (anth 1998) is a good and representative selection of genre work published there. With Michael Andre-Driussi she edited Snake's Hands: A Chapbook About the Fiction of John Crowley (anth 2001 chap; much exp vt Snake's Hands: The Fiction of John Crowley 2003), to which she also contributed several essays. Further critical pieces by Turner have appeared in Asimov's, Locus and The New York Review of Science Fiction. Her one solo book-length work is the nonfiction The History of Hell (1993).

She died of pneumonia, her brother, Daniel Turner, said.
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Item number : 34166

Submitted by : Lo55o (12474)
on : 29/09/2020