Richard “Rick” Lewis Katze, the fan and editor who spent decades preserving Poul Anderson’s short fiction in print, died on August 27th, 2026, at the age of 81. Katze passed away at Oak Knoll Rehabilitation & Healthcare Center in Framingham, Massachusetts, of natural causes following a long series of health problems, after a bout of pneumonia earlier in the year had confined him there for roughly the last six months of his life.
Katze was a longtime member of the New England Science Fiction Association (NESFA) and Massachusetts Convention Fandom, Inc. (MCFI), serving as an officer of both organizations, and was also a member of the Southern California Institute for Fan Interests. NESFA elected him a Fellow in 1980, one of the club’s highest honors.
His most lasting contribution to genre readers came through NESFA Press, where he edited the seven-volume Collected Short Works of Poul Anderson, published between 2009 and 2017. The series gathered the bulk of Anderson’s short fiction, including every Hugo and Nebula nominated and winning story he wrote, across volumes titled Call Me Joe, The Queen of Air and Darkness, The Saturn Game, Admiralty, Door to Anywhere, A Bicycle Built for Brew, and Question and Answer. Katze edited the set largely on his own, with Lis Carey co-editing the first volume and Michael Kerpan joining him for the sixth and seventh. Anderson, a Grand Master of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, won seven Hugo Awards and three Nebula Awards over his career, and Katze’s project gave readers a way to trace that career in full rather than piecemeal across decades of scattered anthologies and out-of-print magazines.
Beyond editing, Katze was a fixture of convention-running in Boston-area fandom for over forty years, volunteering on Worldcons, Westercons, Smofcons, and Boskones. He chaired three Boskones, numbers 21, 28, and 41, and also chaired Lexicon 8. He served multiple times as Hugo Award Administrator for Worldcons, a role that put him at the center of the genre’s most visible award process for years running.
His legal background found its way into fandom as well. As counsel to the Constellation Bailout Committee, he negotiated the settlement of the 1983 Worldcon’s unpaid non-fannish debt down to roughly sixty cents on the dollar, a piece of behind-the-scenes fan history that kept a Worldcon’s financial mess from becoming a lasting black mark.
Katze was born in Boston on October 1st, 1944, graduated from Boston University in 1966, and went on to Suffolk University Law School before practicing law for many years. He later lived in Natick and Framingham. He was preceded in death by his parents, Hyman Allan Katze and Esta Dorothy Katze. Cremation will be private, with details on a memorial service to follow.
For any reader who’s picked up a Poul Anderson collection with Katze’s name on the editor’s page, the work speaks for itself: seven volumes’ worth of a Grand Master’s short fiction, kept in print and in order because one fan decided it needed doing.
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RIP!