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Galouye, Daniel F

Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.

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(1920-1976) US author who was born and died in New Orleans, Louisiana; a naval test pilot during World War Two, he subsequently worked as a journalist, though the delayed effect of war injuries forced him to retire in 1967. He had begun to publish sf with "Rebirth" for Imagination in March 1952, and appeared frequently in the magazines for about a decade with such tales as "Tonight the Sky Will Fall!" (May 1952 Imagination) and "The City of Force" (April 1959 Galaxy), characterized by a combination of a strong Hard-SF structure and a treatment of psychological concerns that was sometimes a touch uneasy. Twice (April 1953, August 1954) he wrote in Imagination as Louis G Daniels. Stories from this period are collected in The Last Leap and Other Stories of the Super-Mind (coll 1964) and Project Barrier (coll 1968); neither volume appeared in the USA.

Galouye's first novel, Dark Universe (1961), a Pocket-Universe tale (see also Conceptual Breakthrough), remains his most popular and is probably his best (it was nominated for a Hugo). Long after a nuclear war, a Ruined Earth culture has evolved deep Underground, where the survivors' descendants live sightless in the pitch black. From daily routine through cosmological concerns, this culture is grippingly and originally conceived, though the book closes with a somewhat anticlimactic escape from darkness into a new age of "enlightenment". Galouye's next novels – Lords of the Psychon (1963), which is based roughly on "The City of Force" (April 1959 Galaxy), Counterfeit World (1964; vt Simulacron-3 1964) and The Lost Perception (1966; vt A Scourge of Screamers 1968) – share the same technical ingenuity and a continuing interest in worlds where the Perception of reality is controlled and restricted, where indeed the worlds themselves may be arbitrary constructs – Counterfeit World being particularly interesting in this last respect. In a sense it is a novel-length reworking of Frederik Pohl's "The Tunnel Under the World" (January 1955 Galaxy), both being about construct-worlds designed for market research (see Advertising); it was filmed for television in Germany by Rainer Werner Fassbinder as Welt Am Draht (1973; vt World on a Wire) and was again filmed as The Thirteenth Floor (1999). Galouye's last novel, The Infinite Man (1973), was less successful.

Galouye was never really able to capitalize on the promising beginning he had made as an sf writer. There is a consensus that his war injuries, which afflicted him more severely as the years passed, kept him from a more fruitful career. [JC]

see also: Arrested Development; Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award; Fermi Paradox; Great and Small; Media Landscape; Psychology; Teleportation; Virtual Reality.

Daniel Francis Galouye

born New Orleans, Louisiana: 11 February 1920

died New Orleans, Louisiana: 7 September 1976

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