Richard Allen Lupoff is an American science fiction and mystery author, who has also written humor, satire, non-fiction and reviews. In addition to his two dozen novels and more than 40 short stories, he has also edited science-fantasy anthologies. He is an expert on the writing of Edgar Rice Burroughs and has an equally strong interest in H. P. Lovecraft.
He began publishing fiction in 1967 with the novel One Million Centuries, followed by Sacred Locomotive Flies and Into the Aether. He is credited with more than 50 books, plus short fiction, non-fiction and memoirs. He sometimes wrote under pseudonyms, such as Ova Hamlet, a name he frequently used for parodies. Pastiche and recursiveness are features of his writing: "pastiche" in that much of his work involves writing stories that play with styles or even universes created by other writers; "recursiveness" meaning that his work often includes other authors or friends as characters. Among his best-known novels are the duology Circumpolar! and Countersolar!. His novel Sword of the Demon was nominated for the 1977 Nebula Award. Robert Silverberg described it as "a strange and austerely beautiful fable that cuts across genre lines." His short fiction, which has often been collected and anthologized, includes the short story "". Originally in the December 1973 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, the story was adapted into both the Oscar-nominated short film ' and the TV movie '. Lupoff appeared in both films as an extra. The major plot device is a time loop, and bears great similarity to that of 1993's Groundhog Day. Lupoff and Jonathan Heap, director of the 1990 film, were "outraged" by the apparent theft of the idea, but after six months of lawyers' conferences, they decided to drop the case against Columbia Pictures. His novelette "After the Dreamtime" and his short story "Sail the Tide of Mourning" received Hugo Award nominations in 1975 and 1976. His first collection of short mystery stories is Quintet: The Cases of Chase and Delacroix. His and Steve Stiles' collaborative graphic novelThe Adventures of Professor Thintwhistle and His Incredible Aether Flyer, originally a series of comic strips in Heavy Metal, is considered a forerunner of steampunk.
Radio program: ''Probabilities''
Starting in 1977, Lupoff co-hosted a program on Pacifica Radio station KPFA-FM in Berkeley, California that featured book reviews and interviews, primarily with science fiction authors. Originally an occasional one-hour program called Probabilities Unlimited, after several months it became a regular weekly, half-hour program called simply Probabilities, which aired until 1995. The program relaunched that year as Cover to Cover; Lupoff departed in 2001 to focus on his writing career. Among the notable authors interviewed by Lupoff and his co-host, Richard Wolinsky, were such luminaries as Ray Bradbury, Octavia Butler, Richard Adams, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Kurt Vonnegut.
