Chad Oliver

His mother was a nurse. Oliver suffered a severe attack of rheumatic fever at age twelve and was bedridden for several months, during which he became interested in science fiction. He spent most of his life in Austin, Texas where he was twice chairman of the department of anthropology of the University of Texas. He was also one of the founders of the Turkey City Writer's Workshop. He first attended the university in 1946 as a student and, apart from a brief sojourn to UCLA to obtain his Ph.D, he remained there in some capacity until his death, 47 years later. He first had a story published in 1950. His science fiction is generally classified as anthropological science fiction because he often used insights from his professional work to inform his fictional writing. His fiction often reflected his anthropology background. He books referenced Native American life, the outdoors, the American Southwest, and relationships between people and land. Commenting on the connection, he said: "I like to think that there's a kind of feedback.. That the kind of open-minded perspective in science fiction conceivably has made me a better anthropologist. Numerous scenes in his writings made reference to actions and experiences related to fishing in moving water (e.g. wading a river in "Shores of Another Sea").

• Name — Chad Oliver • Born — March 30, 1928 • Birthplace — Cincinnati, Ohio • Died — August 9, 1993 (age 65) • Place of death — Austin, Texas • Occupation — * Writer • anthropologist • professor • Period — 1940s–1980s • Genre — Science fiction, Western

Oliver studied at the University of Texas at Austin, earning a B.A. with honors in 1951 and an M.A. in English and anthropology in 1952. His master's thesis, They Builded a Tower, was an early academic study of science fiction and may have been among the first graduate works to focus on magazine science fiction. He earned a doctorate in anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1961. His dissertation was published as Ecology and Cultural Continuity as Contributing Factors in the Social Organization of the Plains Indians in 1962. Oliver returned to the University of Texas at Austin, where he taught anthropology and later served as chair of the department.

• Mists of Dawn (1952) • Shadows in the Sun (1954) • The Winds of Time (1957) • Unearthly Neighbors (1960, revised in 1984) • The Wolf is My Brother (1967) • The Shores of Another Sea (1971) • Giants in the Dust (1976) • Broken Eagle (1989) • The Cannibal Owl (1994)

• "Transfusion" (1959) • "Blood's a Rover" in Robert Silverberg (ed), Deep Space, 1976. Not to be confused with a proposed novel of the same title by Harlan Ellison. • "The Shore of Tomorrow", novelette in Startling Stories March, 1953

Chad Oliver is recorded as anthropologist, novelist, writer and university teacher.

• Another Kind (1955) • The Edge of Forever (1971) • A Star Above and Other Stories (2003) • Far from This Earth and Other Stories (2003)