Sad news via Greencine, the world’s best known and most beloved genre fan has passed on at age 92.

If you grew up a geek in Los Angeles — and, as the four semester president of the Venice High Science Club and, before that, the one term prexy of the Junior Count Dracula Society (an even odder story than it sounds), boy, did I ever — you could not avoid the man everyone knew as “Forry.” For those of you unfamiliar with Mr. Ackerman’s work, he was basically the ultimate fan — “Mr. Sci-Fi” he was dubbed, for he apparently coined the name that many an SF geek with literary pretentions refused to use but that everyone else has taken up ever since. (Even though I haven’t been anything resembling a rabid science fiction purist for decades, I still can’t bring myself to call it that.)

He started his career as a literary agent, whose clients included, among many others, Isaac Asimov, his longtime friend Ray Bradbury, and (I’m pretty sure) the great pulp writer and screenplay collaborator Leigh Brackett (Rio Bravo, The Long Goodbye, The Empire Strikes Back). At the other end of the scale, his Wikipedia entry reminds me that he was also the “illiterary” agent to, you read it here, Ed Wood.

Despite what appears to have been some definite financial success on that account, however, his greatest professional achievement was probably as the editor of Famous Monsters of Filmland, the backbone of Jim Warren’s crude publishing empire that later branched off into semi-adult black and white comic books — also led by another creation of Forry’s, Vampirella. He was also one of the primary founders of the LASFS – the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society (as per its website “this world’s oldest continuously-meeting science-fiction and fantasy club”) which just had a convention over Thanksgiving weekend and which I hope he was able to attend.

Still, at least in these parts, he was best known and loved as the owner of the Ackermansion, his own home and the setting for easily the most impressive collection of horror and…okay…sci-fi related memorabilia and antiquities known to man. When, he moved to smaller quarters in 2002, a collective sigh was heard throughout L.A.’s Geek-American community.

I have two strong personal memories of Mr. Ackerman — who showed up at practically any sf/horror/genre film/comics event you could name for decades. One was when, prior to the first Westal Administration, he escorted my aforementioned high school science fiction club through the Ackermansion, showing off the original robot Maria from Metropolis and some of animator Willis O’Brien’s original models from the 1933 King Kong as well as the 1926 copy of Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories that had started him on his life’s journey at the age of ten. I also remember seeing him when I was probably seventeen or so at Westercon, the largest West Coast science fiction convention that wasn’t focused on Star Trek and that upstart newbie, Star Wars. It was a late night, 16mm screening of a movie that remains a big favorite of mine, the 1973 The Wicker Man.

Just before it started, I turned around and saw the then-sixty-something Forry sprawling across several chairs for an 11:00 screening of a movie he’d probably already seen a few times. (True, it was before even VHS was all that common and it wasn’t exactly easy to see.) He smiled and gave me a wave though he could not possibly know who I was other than just another fellow enthusiast. He was just happy to be watching an obscure movie on a bad projector in a hotel ballroom. A fan through and through.

UPDATE: It’s absolutely no surprise that there’s been a great deal posted about this notable passing since I first wrote this yesterday morning. You can find most of it via good ol’ Dennis Cozzalio’s predictably remarkable post. Of course, Dennis is a true blue horror fan of the first order, and like Guillermo del Toro, accepted monsters into his heart at an early age, so he very much knows whereof…. Anyhow, along with his personal reminiscences on the importance of Famous Monsters to him and to the horror world in general, he’s also posted a three-part video epic documenting his own 1998 visit to the Ackermansion. I call that appointment online viewing if ever there was.

Dennis also links to some worthwhile posts, including one from Tim Lucas, which alludes to some controversies I was totally unaware of. The only criticisms I ever heard of Forry or his magazines had to do with his coinage of “sci-fi,” and the crude writing and bad puns in his magazines. (As a blogger with a love of borsht belt humor, I’m hardly in a position to criticize on either score). Otherwise, everyone seemed to love him personally and respect his work as the ultimate fan and his friendliness to true geeks of all levels was legendary. At least on the most public level, what was there not to like?

Admittedly, the current version of the Famous Monsters wikipedia entry (which I’m not linking to because I’m somewhat suspicious of some of what’s in it right now) seems if not perhaps one-sided, more than a little strange, in its discussion of a lawsuit that, along with our barbaric health care system, reportedly had a lot to do with so tragically draining Ackerman’s resources and forcing him to sell off large chunks of his collection. But, hey, it’s Mr. Sci-Fi/Monsters, we’re talking about, so a little strangeness seems apt.

On a much more positive note, Dennis also links to Glenn Kenny and some extremely worthwhile comments. And it was via Kenny, I stumbled upon this really poignant 2003 Los Angeles Times article by Hillary MacGregor, who apparently tolerated a bit of flirtation from the late octogenarian with very good humor, reposted on their Daily Mirror blog. I was especially taken by a section discussing one of Forry’s lesser known passions…. the long-ago attempt at a one-world language designed to bring on world peace.

….In a mishmash of what sounds like French, Spanish and Italian that is somehow comprehensible to any liberal arts graduate, he tells a visitor her eyes are beautiful, her height striking. He is speaking Esperanto. “In the 20s and 30s, some science fiction stories of the future mentioned that everyone would one day speak Esperanto,” he says. “For me it was like time travel. It was like going 100 years into the future. And if I could bring back a bottle of something, I would be thrilled. At least I could bring back the language everyone would be speaking.”

Something about Ackerman’s snippet of Esperanto seems to capture the soul of science fiction, and of Ackerman himself. It speaks to a utopian vision cherished by people who fantasize about a world where Martians and Klingons and humans can all speak the same language and get along. It is the view of an optimist, the view of a man whose slogan is “Save humanity with science and sanity.”"

Again, what’s not to like?