Edward Elmer Smith was an American food engineer and science-fiction author, best known for the Lensman and Skylark series. He is sometimes called the father of space opera.
John Wood Campbell Jr. was an American science fiction writer and editor. He was editor of Astounding Science Fiction from late 1937 until his death and was part of the Golden Age of Science Fiction. Campbell wrote super-science space opera under his own name and stories under his primary pseudonym, Don A. Stuart. Campbell also used the pen names Karl Van Kampen and Arthur McCann. His novella Who Goes There? was adapted as the films The Thing from Another World (1951), The Thing (1982), and The Thing (2011).
Murray Leinster was a pen name of William Fitzgerald Jenkins, an American writer of genre fiction, particularly of science fiction. He wrote and published more than 1,500 short stories and articles, 14 movie scripts, and hundreds of radio scripts and television plays.
Galaxy Science Fiction was an American digest-size science fiction magazine, published in Boston from 1950 to 1980. It was founded by a French-Italian company, World Editions, which was looking to break into the American market. World Editions hired as editor H. L. Gold, who rapidly made Galaxy the leading science fiction magazine of its time, focusing on stories about social issues rather than technology.
Stanley Grauman Weinbaum was an American science fiction writer. His first story, "A Martian Odyssey", was published to great acclaim in July 1934; the alien Tweel was arguably the first character to satisfy John W. Campbell's challenge: "Write me a creature who thinks as well as a man, or better than a man, but not like a man." Weinbaum wrote more short stories and a few novels, but died from lung cancer less than a year and a half later.
Tom Godwin was an American science fiction author active throughout the 1950s into the 1970s. In his career, Godwin published three novels and around thirty short stories. He is best known for his short story, "The Cold Equations". Published in 1954, the short story was Godwin’s fourth work to be published and was one whose controversial dark ending helped redefine the genre.
In American science fiction of the 1950s and '60s, psionics was a proposed discipline that applied principles of engineering to the study of paranormal or psychic phenomena, such as extrasensory perception, telepathy and psychokinesis. The term is a blend word of psi and the -onics from electronics. The word "psionics" began as, and always remained, a term of art within the science fiction community and—despite the promotional efforts of editor John W. Campbell, Jr.—it never achieved general currency, even among academic parapsychologists. In the years after the term was coined in 1951, it became increasingly evident that no scientific evidence supports the existence of "psionic" abilities.
The Golden Age of Science Fiction, often identified in the United States as the years 1938–1946, was a period in which a number of foundational works of science fiction literature appeared. In the history of science fiction, the Golden Age follows the "pulp era" of the 1920s and 1930s, and precedes New Wave science fiction of the 1960s and 1970s. The 1950s are, in this scheme, a transitional period. Robert Silverberg, who came of age then, saw the 1950s as the true Golden Age.
James Henry Schmitz was an American science fiction writer born in Hamburg, Germany of American parents.
Galaxy novels, sometimes titled Galaxy Science Fiction Novels, were a series of mostly reprint American science fiction novels published between 1950 and 1961.
This is a bibliography of works by American writer John W. Campbell Jr.
The Other Side of the Moon is an anthology of science fiction stories edited by American writer August Derleth. It was first published by Pellegrini & Cudahy in 1949. Many of the stories had originally appeared in the magazines The Graphic Christmas, Astounding Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories, Wonder Stories, Weird Tales, Blue Book, Planet Stories, The Saturday Evening Post, Collier's Weekly or in the collections The Fourth Book of Jorkens by Lord Dunsany and The Witchfinder by S. Fowler Wright.
Year's Best Science Fiction Novels: 1954 is a 1954 anthology of science fiction novellas edited by E. F. Bleiler and T. E. Dikty. An abridged edition was published in the UK by Grayson in 1955 under the title The Year's Best Science Fiction Novels: Second Series. The stories had originally appeared in 1953 and 1954 in the magazines Amazing Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories, Science Stories, Galaxy Science Fiction and Space Science Fiction.
Islands of Space is a science fiction novel by American writer John W. Campbell It was first published in book form in 1957 by Fantasy Press in an edition of 1,417 copies. The novel originally appeared in the magazine Amazing Stories Quarterly; the text was "extensively edited" for book publication, with Campbell's approval, by Lloyd Arthur Eshbach. A paperback edition was published by Ace Books in 1966. In 1973, Islands was included in a Doubleday omnibus of all three "Arcot, Wade, and Morey" novels. A German translation appeared in 1967 as Kosmische Kreuzfahrt, and an Italian translation was published in 1976 as Isole nello spazio.
Analog Science Fiction and Fact is an American science fiction magazine published under various titles since 1930. Originally titled Astounding Stories of Super-Science, the first issue was dated January 1930, published by William Clayton, and edited by Harry Bates. Clayton went bankrupt in 1933 and the magazine was sold to Street & Smith. The new editor was F. Orlin Tremaine, who soon made Astounding the leading magazine in the nascent pulp science fiction field, publishing well-regarded stories such as Jack Williamson's Legion of Space and John W. Campbell's "Twilight". At the end of 1937, Campbell took over editorial duties under Tremaine's supervision, and the following year Tremaine was let go, giving Campbell more independence. Over the next few years Campbell published many stories that became classics in the field, including Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, A. E. van Vogt's Slan, and several novels and stories by Robert A. Heinlein. The period beginning with Campbell's editorship is often referred to as the Golden Age of Science Fiction.
Ahead of Time is a collection of science fiction stories by the American writer Henry Kuttner, first published in hardcover by Ballantine Books in 1953, with a paperback edition shortly afterwards. A British hardcover appeared in 1954, with a paperback following in 1961. Paperback reissues of both the UK and US editions appeared in the mid-1960s. A French translation appeared in 1962 and an Italian translation in 1971.
The Other Side of Here is an science fiction novel by American writer Murray Leinster, first published as a five-part Astounding Stories serial in 1936, under the title "The Incredible Invasion". It was first published in book form, in a "thorough revision", as one side of an Ace Double, in 1955. While no further American editions have been issued, the novel has been translated into Italian, Spanish, French and German. The novels tells the story of "an invasion from the fourth dimension", foiled by an insurrection against the invaders' home government.
A Mile Beyond the Moon is a collection of science fiction stories by American writer C. M. Kornbluth, originally published as a Doubleday hardcover in 1958, shortly after Kornbluth's death. A Science Fiction Book Club edition appeared in 1959, with an abridged paperback edition following from Macfadden Books in 1962. Macfadden reissued the collection in 1966 and, as Manor Books, in 1972 and 1976. A German translation appeared in 1974, and an Italian translation in 1987. While no further editions of the collection were published, all the stories are contained in NESFA's 1997 His Share of Glory: The Complete Short Science Fiction of C. M. Kornbluth.
This is a complete bibliography of works by the American space opera author E. E. Smith.
Science-fiction and fantasy magazines began to be published in the United States in the 1920s. Stories with science-fiction themes had been appearing for decades in pulp magazines such as Argosy, but there were no magazines that specialized in a single genre until 1915, when Street & Smith, one of the major pulp publishers, brought out Detective Story Magazine. The first magazine to focus solely on fantasy and horror was Weird Tales, which was launched in 1923, and established itself as the leading weird fiction magazine over the next two decades; writers such as H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E. Howard became regular contributors. In 1926 Weird Tales was joined by Amazing Stories, published by Hugo Gernsback; Amazing printed only science fiction, and no fantasy. Gernsback included a letter column in Amazing Stories, and this led to the creation of organized science-fiction fandom, as fans contacted each other using the addresses published with the letters. Gernsback wanted the fiction he printed to be scientifically accurate, and educational, as well as entertaining, but found it difficult to obtain stories that met his goals; he printed "The Moon Pool" by Abraham Merritt in 1927, despite it being completely unscientific. Gernsback lost control of Amazing Stories in 1929, but quickly started several new magazines. Wonder Stories, one of Gernsback's titles, was edited by David Lasser, who worked to improve the quality of the fiction he received. Another early competitor was Astounding Stories of Super-Science, which appeared in 1930, edited by Harry Bates, but Bates printed only the most basic adventure stories with minimal scientific content, and little of the material from his era is now remembered.
