Linda Bushyager, longtime fanzine fan and pro author, unexpectedly died November 27. Although she devoted several recent Facebook posts to non-life-threatening back and shoulder problems (the effects of a fall), according to her sister at the same time Linda “was dealing with a long illness due to a malformation of the digestive organs that eventually caused liver failure.”

Born Linda Eyster, she grew up in Levittown, PA. As she told Rich Lynch in an interview, Linda discovered the “sense of wonder” of science fiction when her sixth grade teacher read Fredric Brown’s “Arena” aloud to the class. Soon she had read every science fiction book in the local library.

She entered Carnegie-Mellon in 1965 as a chemistry major. In 1966, while watching The Man From U.N.C.L.E. in the TV room of the women’s dorm, she happened to start a conversation with a freshman at CMU, Suzanne (Suzle) Tompkins, another science fiction reader who soon became a friend.

It wasn’t long afterwards that the idea came to them that they should try to find others on campus with an interest in the genre, and a science fiction club was the way to do it. They became two of the founders of the Carnegie Mellon SF Club, and then in 1967 the Western Pennsylvania SF Association (WPSFA, with the third of the Founding Mothers, Ginjer Buchanan). The Fancyclopedia says initially, meetings were held at Carnegie-Mellon University, since most members were CMU students or graduates, and WPSFA was an off-campus expansion. By May 1968, most members were no longer associated with CMU so the club’s name was changed to WPSFA.

Linda was aboard for the club’s 1968 “death car” expedition to Disclave 12 in Washington, DC. As Fancyclopedia tells it:

The ‘death car’ was a rental station wagon, loaded with nine members of the club and driven by a CMU graduate student, Nancy Lambert. Just before reaching the Maryland border, the club had a near-death experience, when the driver lost control and it spun around several times. Linda Bushyager remembered that “somewhere on the Pennsylvania Turnpike the station wagon began fishtailing. It went into a spin, and I remember Suzle screaming something about ‘Don’t slam on the brakes!’ as Nancy slammed on the brakes. We spun out of control, but fortunately there were no other cars near us, and we ended up in the grass on the side of the road. All of a sudden a lot of cars were driving past us, very slowly, trying to see what the ‘accident’ was all about. Something got into me then, and I yelled, ‘You want blood? Here it is!’ and I staggered and fell on the grass as though I had been injured, just to give the gawkers a thrill. Everyone else seemed to find this wildly funny.” 

Ron Bushyager was a CMU graduate working at the university when he met Linda at a 1968 club meeting, and they were married in 1969. They moved to the Philadelphia area in 1971 and lived there several decades, until they built a house in Las Vegas and relocated in 2002.

Linda said in Karass #1 she read her first science fiction book at the age of 10, and soon concluded she didn’t like fantasy – that it was merely a fluke she had read Lord of the Rings three times. Encounters with Le Guin (Earthsea), Zelazy (Amber) Katherine Kurtz (Deryni), Andre Norton and Marion Zimmer Bradley later changed her mind — to such a degree that Linda wrote two fantasy novels of her own, Master of Hawks (1979) and Spellstone of Shaltus (1980). (She would return to science fiction for the final book of her pro career, Pacifica (2002), co-authored with John Betancourt.)

Linda and Suzle debuted their excellent genzine Granfalloon in 1968, co-editing the first six issues. Linda carried on from there (with Ron as sometimes co-editor) until the last issue in 1976. Twice nominated for the Best Fanzine Hugo (1972, 1973), Granfalloon’s contributors included many notable fans and pros, including Bob Tucker, Piers Anthony, Robert Silverberg, Sandra Miesel, Jerry Kaufman, and Richard Delap. Its most legendary article was Ginjer Buchanan’s report on the 1968 Worldcon, titled “I’ve Had No Sleep and I Must Giggle”.

Linda herself could be quite funny, too. Here’s a brief excerpt of her account of house-hunting in Philadelphia (from a 1972 issue):

…The owner of the house, a tiny five-footer told us it had lots of space. “Look at these closets, they are huge. We have plenty of room.” “What does your husband do?” asked the real estate agent. “He’s a jockey!” the girl said proudly, as we ducked out through the front door.  

“I’m sorry,” I told the agent. “It’s just not big enough for us. We’d need a lot more room for Johann Sebastian Bach Smith.”

“Is that your son?”

“We have no children, that’s our mimeograph.”

“What kind of a dog is that?”

Throughout the Seventies Linda displayed amazing resources of fannish energy.

While still producing a genzine, she started the monthly newzine, Karass, in 1974. (All her fanzine titles came from concepts in Vonnegut novels.) With Locus concentrating on the business of the sff field, and Focal Point having ended publication in 1972, Linda Bushyager’s Karass filled the niche for fannish reporting about fanzines and conventions. When she phased it out four years later, she publicly passed the baton to File 770, which started in January 1978.

She was part of the cast and crew for the first performance of The Mimeo Man parody musical at PgHLANGE VI in 1974. She served on the organizing committee that created the FAAn Awards (Fanzine Activity Achievement Awards), publishing an issue of its internal newsletter The Zine Fan.

Once past the Seventies Linda’s imprint on fandom is less easily documented, although her story, “Manuscript Found in a Coke Can”, from Duprass, a fanzine she co-published with Leslie Smith, was selected for reprint in Fanthology ’87.

She and Ron still attended Worldcons and other conventions as File 770 often mentioned. Upon moving to Las Vegas Linda wrote about being active in its local fandom. And it seems even before they set up housekeeping in Vegas she had discovered games of chance. In 2001 she informed friends that her new e-mail handle was “Misscraps”, explaining it “Comes from the casino game of craps. I played a lot of it for awhile. Actually right now my game of choice is video poker — if you know the correct strategy and on some machines you can have a slight advantage over the casino.” Later that became her Twitter handle.

Once Facebook became an online home to so many fans, Linda got active there, too, and continued to say quoteworthy things. A 2021 Pixel Scroll reported her defense of Toni Weisskopf after the Baen publisher was disinvited as a GoH at that year’s Worldcon.

Thanks to Fanac.org’s Zoom fanhistory project, since 2022 fans have been able to hear Linda and others share the oral history of Pittsburgh fandom in the Seventies: “Fandom in 1970s Pittsburgh Pt1: Ginjer Buchanan, Linda Bushyager, Suzanne Tompkins, Laurie Mann (m)” and “Fandom in 1970s Pittsburgh Pt 2: Ginjer Buchanan, Linda Bushyager, Suzanne Tompkins, Laurie Mann (m)”. Linda’s memories, like the others’, will always be available to speak to us. As the song says, “They can’t take that away from me.”