American
science fiction writer,
fabulist,
mystery writer, and sometime editor,
1923-
1993.
Born in
Yonkers,
NY, Davidson served in the
US Navy from 1942 to 1946, served in
Israel during the
War of Independence in 1948, and lived in
Mexico and
Belize for some years during the
1960s. He died near
Seattle, poor and embittered.
Davidson's writing was strange and varied and frequently wonderful. He was more
erudite (I hate that word, but there's no other) than anybody since
T.S. Eliot, and he just liked language. Much of what he wrote was barely
science fiction, and much of it never tried to be
science fiction. He was subtle,
allusive, and sometimes downright
opaque. In "
Or All the Seas with Oysters" he suggested that safety pins grow up to be coat-hangers, which mature into bicycles; in "
Dagon", he gives us a man who believes himself to be a god, and who turns out to be a fish (that's one of the opaque ones); in "
The House the Blakeneys Built", he gives us a grim rebuttal to
Campbellian thriving-castaways SF stories.
He wrote a number of novels, few if any of which are now in print. If you see
The Kar-Chee Reign (
1965), jump on it; it's one of the best SF novels ever written. There's also an anthology which
is in print, entitled
The Avram Davidson Treasury ed.
Robert Silverberg and
Grania Davis (Davidson's ex-wife). It's worth picking up.