Arthur Jean Cox (1929-2016)

Bill Cox, Arthur Jean Cox, and Earl Thompson at FUNcon I in 1968.

Arthur Jean Cox, center. His brother Bill is on the left, and Earl Thompson on the right. Taken at FUNcon I in 1968.

The death of long-time LASFSian and author Arthur Jean Cox was announced at the club’s October 6 meeting. No details were given.

He never missed a LASFS meeting from May 1945 to January 1952. He served seven terms as secretary and one term as Director. He contributed to the club genzine Shangri L’Affaires, as well as other zines including Science Fiction Times, Riverside Quarterly, and Science Fiction Review.

Cox helped put on 1946 World Science Fiction Convention in Los Angeles.

His first published story, “Twilight Planet,” appeared in F&SF in 1951. LASFS voted him a Fanquet (then a traditional dinner celebrating a club member’s first sale) and named him LASFS Writer of the Year in 1952.

Cox was a contemporary of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, and late in life gave a video interview about such memories as the night in 1950 when he and A.E. Van Vogt were present at the Shrine Auditorium to see Hubbard present the woman he said was the world’s first Clear.

5 thoughts on “Arthur Jean Cox (1929-2016)

  1. I hope my memory is not misattributing this, but I still remember (and quote) this little poem by Cox from a ca. 1968 Yandro:

    My favorite writer Jack Vance,
    Whose pen is as sharp as a lance,
    Collects statuettes
    For obscure novelettes.

  2. Bob Roehm, this looks like a limerick that is missing its last line. Any idea what it might have been?

  3. Cassy B: Bob Roehm, this looks like a limerick that is missing its last line. Any idea what it might have been?

    Rather than an incomplete limerick with seriously defective scansion, I suspect it’s a finished clerihew on the model of …

    Sir Humphrey Davy
    Abominated gravy.
    He lived in the odium
    Of having discovered sodium.
    – Edmund Clerihew Bentley

  4. In your typical clerihew, though, the opening line would just be ‘Jack Vance’; the rhythm is different if you add an epithet. It sounds like a limerick which decided to turn into a clerihew half way through.

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