T. J. Bass (author)

Thomas J. Bassler (July 7, 1932 – December 13, 2011) was an American science fiction author (under the pseudonym T. J. Bass) and physician.

Bassler graduated with a medical degree from the University of Iowa in 1959, afterwards serving a tour of duty as an Army pathologist and starting a family. His writing career was relatively abbreviated, spanning only the years 1968 to 1974; he signed his first story as "Thomas J. Bassler M.D.", switching to his pen name thereafter. A brief biographical note in the September 1968 issue of Worlds of If described him as "a California doctor whose hobbies are marathon running, skin diving, tournament chess [and] considering the medical probabilities involved in man's conquest of space."

Bass' literary output consisted almost entirely of his Hive series, set on a wildly-dystopian future Earth dominated by a vast underground civilization of degenerate four-toed humans known as 'nebishes', who have stripped the planet of nearly all non-human biomass to support a population of three trillion. Bass' only two novels - Half Past Human (1971) and The Godwhale (1974) - both took place in this setting, and were both nominated for the Nebula Award. His only non-Hive works, the novelettes "Star Seeder" and "The Beast of 309", took place in a more-optimistic setting, in a future human interstellar civilization .

Most of Bass' works explored biological themes, with a particular focus on human enhancement through bio-hacking and cybernetics, in some ways anticipating the cyberpunk era. His style was noted for its vivid, almost-anatomical attention to physical detail, informed by his medical background (and sometimes verging on body horror.)

Certain thematic elements tended to reappear across Bass' oeuvre, even in stories that did not share continuity: the raising of clones for organ harvesting, benign artificial intelligence with mobile or human-worn peripherals, a race of aliens known as the Dreg, the evolutionary benefits of genetic diversity, visceral depictions of one-on-one combat, and "Implant" starships intended to establish an Earth biosphere on extrasolar colony worlds.

In addition to Bassler's fiction output, he published a 1979 mass-market diet-and-lifestyle book (The Whole Life Diet) which included the controversial claim that a nonsmoker in sufficiently good condition to complete a marathon in under four hours was at zero risk of a heart attack, no matter what his diet. John Robbins noted that fitness advocate Jim Fixx approvingly quoted Bassler in his best-selling book, The Complete Book of Running, written before his death from heart failure at 52 while running.