Bruce McAllister sold his first story to Worlds of If in July 1963, at 16, and he has been publishing ever since. About 140 stories later, two of them have made the Hugo ballot, in 1988 and 2007, and a third landed in The Best American Short Stories 2007 under guest editor Stephen King. Ask most science fiction readers to name a McAllister book and they draw a blank.
The record is documented. The shelf presence is thin. His earlier story collection did not appear until 2007, 44 years after the debut.
A Navy Family and a Teenage Sale
Bruce Hugh McAllister was born in Baltimore on October 17, 1946, the son of a career Navy officer and an anthropologist. The family moved through Washington, D.C., Florida, California and Italy. He went on to earn degrees at Claremont McKenna and UC Irvine.
The first sale came well before the degrees. “The Faces Outside” ran in If in July 1963, and Judith Merril picked it for The 9th Annual of the Year’s Best S-F, published in 1964. Project Gutenberg hosts the story free.
That same year, in San Diego, the 16-year-old mailed a four-question survey about symbolism in fiction to 150 authors. He wanted to settle an argument with his English teacher. Seventy-five wrote back, and 65 of those replies survive. The Paris Review revisited the survey in December 2011.
Paperbacks, Anthologies, and a Classroom
Humanity Prime came out from Ace in 1971 as an Ace Special and his first novel. Earth loses a war with the alien Cromanths and is destroyed. One starship gets away carrying colonists, who settle a distant world called Prime, adapt to an aquatic existence and forget most of what they knew of Earth. Then a Cromanth ship lands. Wildside Press and Borgo Press reissued it decades later. Goodreads shows a 2.11 average from nine ratings, against 3.92 for Dream Baby.
It landed as the Ace Specials line was fading. The short fiction that followed scattered across magazines and original anthologies, and much of it took on hard subjects.
McAllister worked as an editor in those years too. He assembled the anthologies SF Directions in 1973 and Their Immortal Hearts in 1980, and he served as an associate editor on Harry Harrison and Brian Aldiss’s Best SF series. His stories ran in If and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and in original anthologies such as Universe.
He taught as well. He built the creative writing program at the University of Redlands and left in 1997, and he has coached writers privately since 1998. Somewhere in the 1990s he stepped back from writing. He returned to it in 2003.
Dream Baby
The story that reached the ballots grew out of a war McAllister did not fight. He told French Fries Magazine that he and his college peers avoided service in Vietnam and that survivor's guilt followed. To understand the war, he says, he spent roughly 15 years interviewing about 200 veterans, and about 30 of them became consultants.
“Dream Baby” first ran as a novelette in In the Field of Fire, a 1987 anthology edited by Jack Dann and Jeanne Van Buren Dann, and Asimov’s reprinted it that October. Gardner Dozois put it in his Fifth Annual Collection. It made the 1988 Hugo ballot for Best Novelette, where Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight” won, and it drew a Nebula nomination as well. The 1987 Nebulas were presented on May 21, 1988, and Pat Murphy’s “Rachel in Love” took the award. In the 1988 Locus poll the novelette finished fifth of 29.
The NEA awarded McAllister a creative writing fellowship in 1991. The title story of his later collection, “The Girl Who Loved Animals,” ran in Omni in May 1988.
In 1989 Tor expanded the novelette into a 434-page novel. Mary Damico, an Army nurse, dreams soldiers’ deaths before they happen. A covert CIA unit recruits her, and the team goes into North Vietnam. CreateSpace reissued the book in paperback in December 2010.
Publishers Weekly called the novel a “stunning tour de force.” The book was a nominee for the 1990 Locus Fantasy Award, which Orson Scott Card’s Prentice Alvin won. The 2011 reissue went out with Lucius Shepard’s comparison of the book to Robert Stone and Tim O’Brien.
A Second Hugo Slot and a Stephen King Pick
The 2000s brought a second round of notice. “The Boy in Zaquitos” ran in F&SF in January 2006, and Stephen King, guest editing The Best American Short Stories 2007, picked it. “Kin” followed in Asimov’s that February and made the 2007 Hugo ballot for Best Short Story, where Tim Pratt’s “Impossible Dreams” won over a field that included Neil Gaiman.
“Kin” follows a boy who tries to hire an alien to save his unborn sister from a government order. Escape Pod ran the audio as episode 108 on May 31, 2007. Ten years later LeVar Burton made it the first story on LeVar Burton Reads, which launched June 13, 2017.
“The Crying Child” was a finalist for the 2012 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novelette, which Karen Russell’s “Reeling for the Empire” won. Glimmer Train placed his “White Heron” third in a 2005 contest for very short fiction.
Golden Gryphon Press published The Girl Who Loved Animals and Other Stories in 2007: 17 stories, 310 pages, with an introduction by Harry Harrison and an afterword by Barry Malzberg. Aeon Press followed with The Village Sang to the Sea: A Memoir of Magic in 2013, which made Locus’s Recommended Reading List that year, and with Stealing God and Other Stories on June 17, 2022. That one runs 18 stories and 262 pages, with an introduction by Paul Di Filippo, and Kirkus gave it its “Get It” rating.
The Anthology That Answered Pournelle
In November 1991 Tor published There Won’t Be War, a 309-page paperback that McAllister edited with Harrison. McAllister wrote the introduction and Harrison the afterword, “The End of War.” The title flips There Will Be War, the series Jerry Pournelle and John F. Carr edited for Tor.
Pournelle and Carr ran nine volumes from 1983 to 1990, mixing fiction with essays and poetry on military history and strategy. Castalia House reissued them beginning in 2015 and published Volume X in December 2019. The series drew controversy, and the Harrison and McAllister book was the response. Pournelle later recalled Harrison putting together a competing anthology, but didn’t appear to be fazed by the competing future history.
The two projects answer the same question about war from different directions. Harrison, a World War II veteran, had already lampooned military life in Bill, the Galactic Hero. His and McAllister’s lineup included Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl, J.G. Ballard and Joe Haldeman, whose story was “Beachhead.”
Where to Find Him
Escape Pod’s audio of “Kin” is free to check out, and so is “The Faces Outside” on Project Gutenberg. He’s got Dream Baby and Humanity Prime available on Amazon, and is still doing coaching work. McAllister is listed as a guest at the upcoming 2026 World Fantasy Convention.
McAllister collected two Hugo slots and a Stephen King pick over six decades, and most readers still can’t name one of his books. What would it have taken for the field to build a shelf around his work: a series, or a publisher with more reach?
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