James Edward Sutherland

Big surprise:  I tend to be a bit obsessive.  Especially when it comes to writers and singers.  So it's not at all uncommon for me to try to acquire--or at least experience--a writer or singer's complete works.  Charles Dickens.  Henry Thomas Buckle.  E. L. Doctorow.  Harlan Ellison. Philip Wylie. George Orwell.  Carolyn Chute.  David Bowie. Bob Geldof.  Iggy Pop. John Cale. Lou Reed.  Ryuichi Sakamoto.  John Mellencamp. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.  Some times it's pretty easy. William Shake-speare was a fucking breeze.  Sometimes it's really hard and expensive.  Try collecting the complete works of Philip Wylie sometime and you'll see. And sometimes it seems impossible.  Because there's no trail to follow.

I first read James Sutherland's Stormtrack when it was published in 1974 as the first book in The Harlan Ellison Discovery Series.  I remember liking it, but I forgot about it pretty quickly. In part, no doubt, because the second book in The Harlan Ellison Discovery Series was Arthur Byron Cover's Autumn Angels, and that was just an orgy at first sight.  But I never forgot about James Sutherland.  In fact, I still have a copy of Stormtrack around here somewhere.  And, since I hadn't bumped into any other Sutherland books, every once in a while I'd go Googling to see what I could find. And invariably I would find nothing.  But I never gave up. And yesterday I found some stuff.  Not as much as I'd like to have found, for sure.  3 stories, 9 essays, and a review.  None of them readily available, but most available-ish. In fact, even as we speak, the stories and two of the essays are heading my way, thanks to the munificence of Amazon.com .  Four of the pieces are ensconced in books.  Ironically, I once owned one of those books . . . but it was before I knew or cared about James Sutherland.  All 9 of the remaining pieces are available in issues of Vertex: The Magazine of Science Fiction, and were published between April of 1973 and February of 1975.  And, in fact, so far as I can tell,  February 1975 is the last time James Sutherland published anything.  Which makes me sad. Did he die?  The source I found (isfdb Science Fiction) doesn't think so.  It lists his birth date as August 25, 1948, and has no date of death noted.  (Then again, it also attributed two "essays" to James Edward Sutherland which clearly belong to James Runcieman Sutherland, so maybe they shouldn't be completely trusted.) 

Or did he just stop writing?  Imagine that.  Young James (a mere 24 years old) attends the prestigious Clarion Writer's Workshop in 1972.  Just getting into this place is quite an accomplishment, but it gets even better.  One of his short stories is published in a book put out by the Workshop (Clarion II).  And then he begins writing short articles which are published in Vertex.  Two more stories are published in anthologies.  And then Harlan Ellison himself accepts a story for The Last Dangerous Visions . . . and decides to publish the novel Stormtrack as the first book in his own Discovery Series. How fucking sweet must that have been?  How could James not think that he was On His Way?

And then . . . something happened.  After June 1974 only three pieces are published:  two articles for Vertex and an Italian translation of Stormtrack.  And those might have been in the pipes already.  So what the hell happened in June of 1974?  

Strangely enough, there's another JAMES E SUTHERLAND
who was born in the same year--1948 (but not the same day)--who died in Vietnam on 4/2/1971.  A little too close for comfort.  Which does, I suppose, beg the question, Did this James E Sutherland go to Vietnam, too?  And if he did, what happened to him there?

I hope nothing.  I hope he just got tired of the shit hole of science fiction and decided to do something else with his life.  Even though I would very much like to be reading his novels and short stories and articles to this day.

Here's the stuff I found on the internet:

James Edward Sutherland 
born Greenwich, Connecticut: 25 August 1948

US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "At the Second Solstice" in Clarion II (anthology 1972) edited by Robin Scott Wilson; in his Near Future sf novel, Stormtrack (1974), astronauts manning a weather satellite must deal with the Disaster of a storm of unprecedented ferocity. 


Novel

Stormtrack (June 1974) 
translated into Italian as L'osservatorio  (The Observatory) by Beata Della Frattina (March 1975)

Short Fiction 

"At the Second Solstice" (1972) in Clarion II June 1972)
"Beside Still Waters (1972) with Edward Bryant in Generation: An 
          Anthology of Speculative Fiction (July 1972)
"Swords of Ifthan (1973) in Omega (1973) --9 reprints:  Omega 
          August 1974, 100 Great Science Fiction Short Stories March 
          1978, August 1980, plus 5 other printings, and Urania #815, 
          December 1979
"The Amazonas Link (unpublished) --purchased for The 
                  Last Dangerous Visions

Essays 

"Introduction (A Journal of the Plague Year) (1968)*
"From Competition 4: Story Leads from the Year's Worst Fantasy and SF (1973) 
"The Truck That Flies (Vertex, April 1973) 
"The Next Drop You Drink (Vertex, June 1973) 
"Geothermal Power - Nature's Home Remedy (Vertex, October 1973) 
"Life At A Distance (Vertex, December 1973) 
"The Unhuman Explorers (Vertex, February 1974) 
"Ghost Universe (Vertex, June 1974) 
"Lands Adrift (Vertex, August 1974) 
"Europeans in Space (Vertex, February 1975) 
"Introduction (The Ladies of Grace Adieu) (2006) **

*James Runcieman  Sutherland 1900 to 1996
** Professor James Sutherland, Director of Sidhe Studies , University of AberdeenApril 26, 1900, died February 24, 1996.  Looks like these two are (1) not James Edward Sutherland and (2) are the same guy . . . though that's more than a bit confusing, since the second piece referred to here was "written" in 2006, which is ten years after this fellow died.  

Review 

Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke  (Vertex, February 1974) 

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?15768