Robert Plank died of a heart attack on July 15, He had been in poor health for some time which didn't keep him from working , but had recovered sufficiently to travel to California just before his sudden death. He was not one to seek the limelight, being a rather quiet personality, and this may have contributed to the fact that most of the SF reference works save for scholarly bibliographies ignore his considerable contribution to SF scholarship.
His major work in literary criticism is undoubtedly the book The Emotional Significance of Imaginary Beings: A Study of the Interaction Between Psychotherapy, Literature, and Reality in the Modern World , a far-ranging and erudite investigation of the "father figures" in SF, the aliens superior to mankind, be they benevolent or malevolent. The volume was published in Springfield, Illinois by Charles C. Thomas, a highly respected publisher, but unfortunately one specializing in books for practitioners of medicine, and this fact maybe prevented the book, surely one of the most profound monographs on an SF motif, from reaching its proper audience.
Dr Plank often spoke of his plans for a sort of sequel to the earlier volume, on the "son figures," the artificial beings in SF, but this wasn't to be; and essays such as "Quixote's Mills: The Man-Machine Encounter in SF" SFS No. His preoccupation with SF arose from his interest in utopian literature, in man's nobler aspirations an interest that found expression in a little study of the controversial utopist Josef Popper-Lynkeus [], Der Plan des Josef Popper-Lynkeus [], written in collaboration with his friend Frederick P.
Hellin, and unfortunately available only in German , and he wrote essays on SF long before the general academic interest in SF started. He published in professional journals such as the International Record of Medicine, American Imago, and American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, but also in the Partisan Review "Lighter than Air, but Heavy as Hate: An Essay in Space Travel," Winter , reprinted in Leslie Fiedler's anthology The Art of the Essay [ ]. Later, he was among the earliest contributors to Extrapolation and SFS, but also wrote for fanzines like the Riverside Ouarterly where one of his most penetrating essays, on the "Omnipotent Cannibals" in Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, appeared.
His first works on SF were much influenced by the early Viennese psychoanalysts, and he especially drew attention to Hanns Sachs's "Die Verspätung des Maschinenzeitalters" , in Imago , and Victor Tausk's "Uber die Entstehung des 'Beeinflussungsapparates' in der Schizophrenie" , and he found that SF was morphologically similar to schizophrenic manifestations, a view that he thought did not apply to later SF. With the early psychoanalysts he shares the clarity of style, and like them he was formed by a deep grounding in European literature, especially German literature aside from Goethe and Schiner, he treasured especially Conrad Ferdinand Meyer and Carl Spitteler.
