James Van Hise: Anyone know anything about him?

[n3aak]

I've been buying a lot of used older reference books lately from ThriftBook.com (seriously, if you want to fill out you collection cheaply, this is the place to do it. Most titles are under $4 and you get free shipping after spending only $10) and other places. Anyways, I've noticed this guy has written just a ton of unofficial reference books over the years. Does anyone know who he is? It makes me wonder if he ever tried to get any of his books published officially.

 

[n3aak]

Thriftbooks.com, sorry.

 

[feek61]

I bought some photos from him . . . 42 years ago. More recently I bought some stuff he wrote but I was unimpressed. The photos were truly amazing back in the day.

 

[Therin of Andor]

James Van Hise was the longtime editor of "Enterprise Incidents", in its day a very slick prozine (ie. professional-looking fanzine). Alongside "Trek", these were very popular sources of fan-written articles in the 70s.

As rival "Trek" moved into a series of "best of..." paperbacks through Signet in the 80s, JVH gravitated towards self-publishing trade-size books with Hal Shuster (well known identity in the US convention circuit). "Enterprise Incidents" was also restarted as a professional magazine, and transformed through various titles (such as "SF Movieland"), extending its reach beyond "Star Trek" to embrace other SF media shows, perhaps attempting to rival "Starlog".

Van Hise's wife, Della, was prominent in the fanfic and "K/S" worlds and wrote a pro Trek novel, "Killing Time", which proved to be controversial.

https://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/James_Van_Hise
https://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Della_Van_Hise

 

[F. King Daniel]

I was going to say Della Van Heise's husband who wrote lots of unlicensed Trek books in the late 80's and early 90's but @Therin of Andor ninja'd me.

My favourite work of his is Trek: The Printed Adventures, a Voyages of Imagination of it's time, but also featuring sections on fanzines and fanfic which I've been hunting down and absorbing digital versions of ever since.

 

[n3aak]

Thank you so much for the info, it just was interesting to me that thi guy's name kept coming up so much. The fandom history is really interesting.