My article "When, Not Where, Was Ray Bradbury?" attempted to show how Bradbury's late fiction used, not the world of Los Angeles fandom from his youth, but the more abstract world of science fiction entering the national consciousness through the publication of "The Foghorn" in a slick magazine, as its reference across the decades. Mine was a literary analysis, though other critics might have used other methods.

VECTOR readers might like to know about a couple of books which take a different approach, while still looking closely at authors' work. This is an area known as psychobiography, and one book which applies it to science fiction is Alan C. Elms' UNCOVERING LIVES: THE UNEASY ALLIANCE OF BIOGRAPHY AND PSYCHOLOGY (New York: OUP 1994). In separate sections Elms provides case studies of the early psychologists such as Freud, Jung and Skinner, and later he provides comparisons of George Bush and Suddam Hussein and their upbringings. But most relevantly he has five chapters on SF and fantasy authors, including John Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Jack Williamson and L. Frank Baum.

In looking at why John Campbell never wrote any original fiction after he published "The Thing From Another World" at the age of 27, Elms reveals some interesting biographical information. Campbell's mother was one of completely identical twins: his aunt hated him, and his mother had an extremely short temper. Elms quotes Sam Moskowitz's biography: "Every time his aunt visited the home, this situation posed itself until it became a continuing and insoluble nightmare. Was the woman standing in front him 'friend' or 'foe'?" The Thing that Campbell created in his fiction had these qualities, but worse for Campbell was that no matter how he extrapolated these qualities into his monster they did not create the catharsis that would free his powers of imagination. He became the nursemaid to many authors, he gave birth to no more original work himself.

The chapter on Asimov deals with his combination of acrophobia (fear of heights) and agoraphobia (fear of open spaces). Elms points out that when Asimov returned to major fiction writing with ROBOTS OF DAWN he had abandoned the emphasis on detection which had driven THE CAVES OF STEEL thirty years before, and emphasised Lije Bailey's neurotic anxieties instead. In a series of letters to Asimov he attempted to identify how Asimov might have worked through his problems (successfully or not), and also shows how psychological handicaps are turned into fiction by successful authors, regardless of whether it brings the author a cure to his problems.

Elms also includes a good chapter on L Frank Baum. As the sleeve note says, "He reveals an unintended subtext of THE WIZARD OF OZ - that males are weak, females are strong (think of Scarecrow, tin Man, the Lion and the Wizard, versus the good and bad witches and Dorothy herself) - and traces this in part to Baum's childhood heart disease, which kept him from strenuous activity, and to his relationship with his mother-in-law, Matilda Joslyn Gage, a distinguished advocate of women's rights." (By the way, what this also reveals is that Geoff Ryman's WAS is an outstanding work of invention, and Ryman's Baum a complete fiction).

The other book is Robert Lindner's THE FIFTY-MINUTE HOUR: A COLLECTION OF TRUE PSYCHOANALYTIC TALES (first published in 1954, I have the 1986 edition published by Free Association Books). What is of interest here is chapter five "The Jet Propelled Couch: The story of Kirk". Kirk is in psycho-analysis because of his crippling problems, despite being a government scientist. Kirk believes that the powers of telepathy and teleportation are entering his world. Like a good Freudian Lindner takes Kirk back to his childhood and his unconscious sexual stirrings, talking through until Kirk is able to see that his SF imaginings are just that - imagination. All of Lindner's patients are disguised, but there have been suggestions that "Kirk" was actually Cordwainer Smith. Smith is also dealt with in UNCOVERING LIVES, but Elms does not mention Lindner's book, but then Elms was not a psycho-analyst. (Incidentally, it was Lindner who invented the phrase "Rebel Without A Cause").