William Sleator
William Sleator was an American writer and composer, born on February 13, 1945, in Havre de Grace, Maryland, and raised in St. Louis, Missouri. He displayed an early passion for writing, starting at age six, and later pursued degrees in music and English from Harvard University. Sleator's career encompassed both prose and musical composition, leading him to work as a rehearsal pianist for the Boston Ballet and compose ballet scores. His literary works primarily explore themes related to the grotesque and macabre, often weaving in elements of science fiction. Notable novels include *The House of Stairs*, *Interstellar Pig*, and *The Duplicate*, which address complex themes such as existentialism and time travel. Sleator's writing is characterized by its fast pace and relatable adolescent protagonists facing extraordinary circumstances. His success allowed him to enjoy a varied lifestyle, splitting his time between Boston and Bangkok.
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William Sleator
Author
- Born: February 13, 1945
- Birthplace: Havre de Grace, Maryland
- Died: August 3, 2011
Biography
William Warner Sleator III—known within the family as Billy—was born on February 13, 1945, in Havre le Grace, Maryland, and was brought up in St Louis, Missouri. He began writing at the age of six, dividing his attention thereafter between prose and musical composition, perennially guided by a fascination with the grotesque and macabre. He graduated from the University City High School in 1963 and went on to Harvard, where he obtained bachelor’s degrees in music and English in 1967. He was regarded as something of a musical prodigy, and had already begun writing film scores, but he also kept a voluminous journal while he was at Harvard and afterwards.
In 1967-1968, Sleator studied musical composition and worked as an accompanist at the Royal Ballet School in London. He became involved in the renovation of a cottage that the school owned, where he was lodged; set in a forest, it had once served as a place of quarantine for smallpox victims. The painstaking record of this experience made in his journal became the basis of his first novel, Blackbriar.
Sleator had previously written the text for The Angry Moon, a recycled folktale illustrated by Blair Lent that had won a Caldecott Honor Medal. His second novel, Run, was similarly based on a journal record of house in which he had lived. His writing career made relatively slow progress between 1974 and 1983, while he worked as a rehearsal pianist for the Boston Ballet Company, touring extensively in the United States and Europe. He composed three ballets that were performed by the company, one of which was Incident at Blackbriar.
Sleator’s first venture into science fiction was a didactic assault on behavioral science, The House of Stairs, but he used genre materials in a much more lightheated spirit when he returned to it in the early 1980’s, having published Into the Dream in the interim. The Green Future of Tycho is a conventional space opera, but Interstellar Pig, in which aliens play games with humans, was much more distinctive. Parasite Pig added a belated sequel, but Sleator followed it up with a number of intelligent and challenging adventure stories that exploited ideas from contemporary physics in order to subject his juvenile protagonists to extraordinary experiences. Singularity, The Boy Who Reversed Himself, Strange Attractors, The Boxes, and Marco’s Millions are all portal fantasies exploring space, time and other dimensions.
The similarly inclined Boltzmon! is an intrusive fantasy featuring a remnant of a black hole. The cautionary aspect of these tales was more assertively foregrounded in The Duplicate, in which a time-pressed teenager who thinks that multiplying himself might solve his problems learns better, and Rewind, in which the ability of go back in time similarly proves less useful than the teenager with that ability had expected. All these novels are fast-paced and breezily written, but they are unusual in the field of contemporary children’s science fiction in touching upon existential issues similar to those raised with the aid of similar devices in the adult fantasies of Thomas Berger. The success of these works allowed Sleator to adopt an exotic lifestyle, dividing his time between homes in Boston, Massachusetts, and Bangkok, Thailand.