Little did I know when I wrote about my mother’s writing a couple of years ago, that someone would republish her series of science fiction novels from the 1960’s. I am gratefully amazed at all the effort and time Winston Crutchfield of Critical Media, put in to making this a reality. My small part included going back, to reread and reevaluate her work after sixty years, yet it has not been easy. But I am thankful because the process has given me a deeper understanding of why my mother did some of the things she did and helped me release many difficult memories to God. Now, back in that time when I was a kid, I guess that to our neighbors, mom seemed, well to put it politely, eccentric. To my sister and I, she was our “crazy mom!”, but according to some sources today, she is considered one of the more influential women science fiction writers of her generation. But just who was the real Diane Detzer?

Now back in those days, readers thought she was Adam Lukens, (her pen name), and boy did mom hate being coerced into using a man’s name! But that was the late 1950’s and her agent, Scot Meredith, insisted that very few people would take a woman seriously as a science fiction writer. So she went along and seven novels later she finally began to use her own name. But just what motivated her to write so furiously for those ten plus years, and what led to her disappearing from the scene?

The answers to those questions remind me of Winston Churchill’s quote about Russians, “Russia is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” My mother, Diane Detzer, was born in 1930, and though like everyone in her generation, her thinking was affected by the economic disaster of ’29, she was really more of a Navy brat than a child of the depression. Probably of greatest impact was them living at Pearl Harbor, during the Japanese surprise attack on December 11, 1941. Though my grandfather, Captain A. J. Detzer (or Gus as his friends called him) survived the bombing, my mom who was just eleven years old, it meant moving almost 5,000 miles back home to Ridgefield, Connecticut. What motivated her to become a science fiction writer, rather than an author of romance, mystery or even a newspaper reporter remains that enigma. Was it her passion for adventure, a desire to make heroes of the little guys or just sticking up for the underdogs struck a chord with her readers?

Surprisingly, the choice of genre was far less important to mom, than the research that went into making her stories work. She would spend months becoming familiar with the details behind her characters, such as getting to know what everyday life was like for someone in a wheelchair, for The Sea People, for the blind in Eevalu and about the culture of gypsies for the character, Doctor Kinowski in her later books. Then, after the research came weeks and weeks of thunderous typing on her Royal typewriter, which sat on the dining room table. I still remember drifting off to sleep as a child, with the ding of the return and the brrrrup, of her slamming the carriage back for the next line. By the early 1960’s, the growing popularity of her books motivated her to start a local Writer’s workshop, which she cheerfully titled, “Coffee and Cigarettes.” The collection of characters who showed up to smoke, write and down cups of coffee were both kind of weird and amazing to me as an eleven-year-old. But mom’s pursuit of writing excellence didn’t translate well into excellence in relationships. Her marriage to my dad lasted only a bit over a year. Two years later she remarried a rather overly strict and strict disciplinarian named Arthur Lukens (where her pen name came from). I am sure Art intended to be a good dad and husband but though there I have some happy memories of playing baseball, and eating mom’s home-made bread our home also was often filled with long loud arguments in the evenings. By the time I was twelve we moved back with my grandparents to Connecticut and there she met and married her third husband, the artist Rudy de Reyna. They met while mom was teaching at the Famous Writer’s School and he at the Famous Artist’s School. I liked Rudy a lot and he was a good step-dad to my sister and I, but again in the evenings we would hear the arguments and their relationship ended after just three years. All of the craziness at home probably had some effect on her writing, but her decision to try switching from Sci-fi to Romance in the 1970’s went nowhere, and coupled with a time of mental collapse, somehow mom just gave up on writing.

But while she wrote, mom conveyed an intensity and adventure coupled with her effortless dialogue and interesting characters some wonderful stories in her 7-8 books. I so am grateful for Winston Crutchfield, who has worked long and hard to bring back to life the first of these, titled, The Sea People, published by Avalon in 1959 and I hope that you will have as much fun reading as mom did when she was writing and pounding away her story on that royal typewriter so many years ago!

Today, her very first full-length novel, The Sea People” is now available again in soft cover at Barnes and Noble.com and in eBook form at Amazon Kindle. Here is the Kindle link.