In Memoriam – John Dalmas

John Dalmas (b.1926 as John Robert Jones) died in June following a short bout of pneumonia.  In 1969, when Dalmas was working for the US Forest Service, he published the novel, The Yngling, which was serialized in Analog and published in book form in 1971.  Two stand-alone stories appeared in Analog in 1970, but Dalmas didn’t publish any more fiction until his retirement, when his novel The Varkaus Conspiracy appeared in 1983.

Throughout the 1980s, he published multiple books each year, including Fanglith and its sequel and the novels in The Regiment series. Dalmas’ productivity slowed toward the end of the 1990s, although he published a handful of books in the early 2000, ending with 2004’s The Second Coming, although he published two volumes of The Signature of God in 2013. Some of his short fiction was collected in Otherwhens, Otherwheres: Favorite Tales, and stories related to his novels tended to be collected with his short novels.  In addition to his fiction, Dalmas wrote several pieces on ecology and high-elevation forests relating to his job in the Forest Service.