Chad Oliver (Symmes Chadwick Oliver, 1928–1993) was a prolific US anthropologist and science fiction writer whose short fiction appeared in major science fiction and fantasy magazines over a forty-year career. His science fiction novels were less successful, but he was an award-winning writer of Westerns.
In the introduction to A Star Above It: Selected Short Stories by Chad Oliver, volume 1, writer Howard Waldrop credits Oliver’s introduction to speculative fiction to an early illness. “When he was twelve, Oliver was hit with rheumatic fever. Gone were bicycles, fly rods, baseball bats…One day by mistake, he was brought, along with [his preferred] air-combat [pulp fiction], one of the old encyclopedia-sized Amazing Stories. Chad leafed through it, came across Edmond Hamilton’s ‘Treasure on Thunder Moon,’ read it and pronounced it ‘the greatest piece of literature ever written!’ ” Soon, Oliver was devouring as much science fiction as he could find and “the letter columns of the SF magazines were full of things signed ‘Chad Oliver, the Loony Lad of Ledgewood.’ ”
Although born in Ohio, Oliver spent most of his life in Texas, where he took his MA at the University of Texas (his 1952 thesis, “They Builded a Tower,” was an early academic study of science fiction) and also founded Texas’s first SF fanzine, Moon Puddle. After taking a PhD in anthropology from the University of California, Los Angeles, he became professor of anthropology at the University of Texas, Austin. He also helped found the Turkey City Workshop, popularized by noted cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling.
Oliver’s science fiction consistently reflected both his professional training and his place of residence: much of it is set in the outdoors in the US Southwest, and most of his characters are deeply involved in outdoor activities. Oliver was also always concerned with the depiction of Native American life and concerns: The Wolf Is My Brother (1967), which is not SF, features a sympathetically characterized Native American protagonist. Most of Oliver’s science fiction, too, could be thought of as Westerns of the sort that eulogize the land and the people who survive in it.
His first published story, “The Land of Lost Content,” appeared in Super Science Stories in November 1950. He collaborated with noted weird horror writer Charles Beaumont on the two-story Claude Adams series (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, 1955). Oliver’s first novel, a juvenile, was Mists of Dawn (1952), a time travel story whose young protagonist is cast back fifty thousand years into a prehistoric conflict between Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons. Shadows in the Sun (1954), set in Texas, describes with some vividness its protagonist’s paranoid discovery that all the inhabitants of a small town are aliens, but that it may be possible for Earth to gain galactic citizenship, and that he can work for that goal by living an exemplary life on his home planet.
Oliver was a pioneer in the application of competent anthropological thought to science fiction themes, and though occasional padding sometimes stifled the warmth of his early stories, he was a careful author whose speculative thought deserves to be more widely known and appreciated.
“Let Me Live in a House” showcases Oliver at his very best—a paranoid, tense science fiction story (first published in 1954) that was made into a Night Gallery episode by Rod Serling and explores ideas of identity and existence. This story was also published under the title “A Friend to Man.”