Robert Conquest

(July 15, 1917 – August 3, 2015)

George Robert Acworth Conquest was a UK fan, pro, editor and poet active from the 1930s.

He co-edited with Kingsley Amis the five Spectrum anthologies between 1961 and 1966. A novel, A World of Difference: A Modern Novel of Science and Imagination, was published in 1955.

Conquest had joined the British Interplanetary Society in 1939 and had been an occasional visitor to the White Horse . He attended the Festivention in 1951 and Walt Willis described him as:

a well-known poet who recently managed to get into The Listener, the BBC's literary review, a really excellent poem plugging sf

Conquest also attended the London SF Con in 1952 and was a speaker at the 'embassy con', a seminar and exhibition at the US Embassy in London in January 1973. In 1967, and along with Brian Aldiss and Kingsley Amis, he helped make the case for New Worlds to receive a grant from the UK's Arts Council.

Brian Aldiss recalled meeting him in the basement of Les Flood's Fantasy Book Centre:

A young man was down there examining an early copy of Amazing Stories. He looked up at me and, lightly thumping the magazine cover, he said, 'This was Frank R. Paul's pink period.'
...
Conquest was a man of a good spirit and good spirits. In the 60s, he, together with Kingsley and Edmund Crispin, were soldiers of the popular literati who could always be relied upon to fight the battle for science fiction in places of culture such as the New Statesman and the Daily Mail. 

Links

• Entry in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction
• Robert Conquest in Internet Speculative Fiction Database

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Person

1917—2015

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