| Movies | Music | Timeline | Awards |
| Robert Aickman | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Vital statistics | |
| Occupation | Author |
| Gender | Male |
| Birth Date | June 27, 1914 |
| Birth Location | London, England |
| Death Date | February 26, 1981, age 66 |
| Death Location | London, England |
| Notable Works | Cold Hand in Mind: Strange Stories |
Robert Fordyce Aickman (June 27, 1914 – February 26, 1981) was an English conservationist and writer of fiction and nonfiction. As a conservationist, he is notable for co-founding the Inland Waterways Association, a group which has preserved from destruction and restored England's inland canal system. As a writer, he is best known for his supernatural fiction, which he described as "strange stories".
As a writer, Aickman is best known for the 48 "strange stories" which were published in eight volumes, one of them posthumous. The American collection Painted Devils consists of revised versions of stories which had previously appeared in other books.
Cold Hand in Mine and Painted Devils featured dust jacket drawings by acclaimed gothic illustrator Edward Gorey. August Derleth proposed that Arkham House should publish a book of Aickman's best stories, but was unable to meet the author's demands and withdrew the proposal. The original collections of short stories are quite scarce, though copies of the U.S. edition of Cold Hand in Mine are very plentiful.
Aickman's published novels were The Late Breakfasters (London: Victor Gollancz, 1964) and The Model: A Novel of the Fantastic (New York: Arbor House, 1987). The latter was a novella which had remained unpublished in his lifetime. Aickman had hoped to have had the latter work illustrated by Edward Gorey. Another novel, entitled Go Back at Once, remains unpublished. S. T. Joshi is at work on this and it may be published.
A previously unpublished short story, "The Fully Conducted Tour", appeared in the Tartarus Press periodical Wormwood in 2005.