Jack Chalker, 60; wrote science fiction novels

BALTIMORE -- Jack L. Chalker, who wrote more than 60 science-fiction and fantasy novels, died of kidney failure Friday at Bon Secours Hospital in Baltimore. He was 60.

Mr. Chalker won numerous awards during a career that began in his early teens with a literary magazine, Mirage, that he produced on an electric mimeograph machine and assembled with friends on the dining-room table of his family's home. "He would write famous authors and see if they wanted to write free nonfiction pieces for his magazine, and a surprising number did," said his wife, Eva C. Whitley.

The magazine earned Mr. Chalker, then 14, a nomination for the Hugo Award, the genre's highest honor, presented by the World Science Fiction Society. Mr. Chalker would be nominated for three more Hugos in his career.

"He was one of the greats in our field," said Catherine Asaro, president of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Inc. "He always had something provocative to say, his creativity in imagining different universes."

Mr. Chalker's 1977 novel "Midnight at the Well of Souls," about a walking, talking plant with brains in its feet, sold hundreds of thousands of copies, his wife said.

Whitley prefers 1979's "And the Devil Will Drag You Under."

"His most memorable scene had two giant King Kongs on the Empire State Building, battling for control of the universe," said Whitley, who married Mr. Chalker in 1978 aboard a ferryboat on the Susquehanna River.

Growing up in the Howard Park neighborhood of northwest Baltimore, Mr. Chalker was 13 when he took a bus to Washington for his first science-fiction club meeting, and he was hooked. Several years later, he and a high-school friend founded the Baltimore Science Fiction Society.

Mr. Chalker organized the society's first Balticon, an annual conference now in its 39th year that has grown from a few dozen attendees to as many as 2,000.

"It's a relatively small field, and because science fiction has so many conventions, it's very hard not to meet 90 percent of the writers," said author Mike Resnick. His book with Mr. Chalker, "The Science Fantasy Publishers: A Critical and Bibliographic History," was a Hugo finalist in 1992.