Dickson was born in Edmonton, Alberta, in 1923. After the death of his father, he moved with his mother to Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1937. He served in the United States Army, from 1943 to 1946, and received a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Minnesota, in 1948. From 1948 through 1950 he attended the University of Minnesota for graduate work. His first published speculative fiction was the short story "Trespass!", written jointly with Poul Anderson, in the Spring 1950 issue of Fantastic Stories Quarterly, the inaugural number of Fantastic Story Magazine as it came to be titled. Next year three of his solo efforts were published by John W. Campbell in Astounding Science Fiction and one appeared in Planet Stories. Anderson and Dickson also inaugurated the Hoka series with "The Sheriff of Canyon Gulch". Dickson's series of novels include the Childe Cycle and the Dragon Knight. He won three Hugo awards and one Nebula award. For a great part of his life, he suffered from the effects of asthma. He died of complications from severe asthma.
Character as an author
has characterized Dickson as a "gregarious, engaging, genial, successful man of letters", who had not been an introvert. Clute considers Dickson a science fiction romantic. Nevertheless, Clute stresses in connection to Dickson that science fiction welcomes "images of heightened solitude, romantically vague, limitless landscapes, and an anguished submission to afflatus", due to its origin in Gothic fiction.
Style
Clute points out that Dickson, like Poul Anderson, with whom he collaborated in the Hoka series, " to infuse an austere Nordic pathos into wooded, rural midwestern American settings". His works often have mercenaries as their protagonists and deal with aliens that are "less deracinated and more lovable than humans". They "are inclined to take on a heightened, sagalike complexion", particularly through the insertion of lyric poetry that is sometimes rather inferior.
In the novel Wolfling, Dickson described an advanced alien weapon, "the rod", which bears a striking resemblance to the Star Wars Light Saber. Dickson's Wolfling was published in three parts in the magazine Analog, January 1969 – March 1969. The cover for the January 1969, which contained the first part, depicts an alien holding a rod. In a 1977 interview, George Lucas stated "As a kid, I read a lot of science fiction,…I was interested in Harry Harrison…”. The March 1969 issue of Analog ends a Harry Harrison story on the back of a double-page drawing of a duel with "rods", illustrating the third, and last, part of Dickson's Wolfling. Dickson described the duel thus, "… something in appearance like a cross between the flame of a welding torch and the arc of a static electricity charge crackled from the end of the rod … even as it burst from the end of the rod … the discharge from Galyan's rod met the discharge from Slothiel's head on, and the two lines of white fire splashed harmlessly into an aurora of sparks, …".
Dickson received the 1977 Skylark —Edward E. Smith Memorial Award for Imaginative Fiction from NESFA— for his contribution to SF and he was inducted by the Science Fiction and FantasyHall of Fame in 2000. He won several annual literary awards for particular works. ;Hugo Award
