Del Rey, Lester 1915 1993 en 5 7487 Lester del Rey (Ramon Felipe Alvarez-del Rey) (June 2, 1915 - May 10, 1993) was an American science fiction author and editor. According to Lawrence Watt-Evans, his birth name was actually Leonard Knapp. Source: Wikipedia Kuttner, Henry 1915 1958 en 4 4985 Henry Kuttner (April 7, 1915–February 4, 1958) was a science fiction author born in Los Angeles, California. As a young man he worked for a literary agency before selling his first story, "The Graveyard Rats", to Weird Tales in 1936. Kuttner was known for his literary prose and worked in close collaboration with his wife, C. L. Moore. They met through their association with the "Lovecraft Circle", a group of writers and fans who corresponded with H. P. Lovecraft. Their work together spanned the 1940s and 1950s and most of the work was credited to pseudonyms, mainly Lewis Padgett and Lawrence O'Donnell. Both freely admitted that one reason they worked so much together was because his page rate was higher than hers. In fact, several people have written or said that she wrote three stories which were published under his name. "Clash by Night" and The Portal in the Picture, also known as Beyond Earth's Gates, have both been alleged to have been written by her. L. Sprague de Camp, who knew Kuttner and Moore well, has stated that their collaboration was so intensive that, after a story was completed, it was often impossible for either Kuttner or Moore to recall who had written which portions. According to de Camp, it was typical for either partner to break off from a story in mid-paragraph or even mid-sentence, with the latest page of the manuscript still in the typewriter. The other spouse would routinely continue the story where the first had left off. They alternated in this manner as many times as necessary until the story was finished. Among Kuttner's most popular work were the Gallegher stories, published under the Padgett name, about a man who invented robots when he was stinking drunk, only to be completely unable to remember exactly why he had built them after sobering up. These stories were later collected in Robots Have No Tails. In the introduction to the paperback reprint edition after his death, Moore stated that all the Gallagher stories were written by Kuttner alone. In 2007, New Line Cinema released a feature film based on the Lewis Padgett short story "Mimsy Were the Borogoves" under the title The Last Mimzy. In addition, The Best of Henry Kuttner was republished under the title The Last Mimzy Stories. Source: Wikipedia Godwin, Tom 1915 1980 en 5 3574 Tom Godwin (1915–1980) was a science fiction author. Godwin published three novels and thirty short stories. His controversial hard SF short story The Cold Equations is a notable in the mid-1950s science fiction genre. He also had three novels published, but these stayed more firmly in John W. Campbell's preferred styles and are less notable. His life was difficult one. After family tragedies, he dropped out of school in the third grade. He also suffered from kyphosis and may have had difficulties with alcoholism later in life. Source: Wikipedia Jones, Raymond Fisher 1915 1994 en 3 2492 Raymond F(isher) Jones (November 15, 1915, Salt Lake City, Utah - January 24, 1994, Sandy, Utah) was an American science fiction author. He is best known for his 1952 novel, This Island Earth, which was adapted into the 1955 film This Island Earth. Jones' career was at its peak during the 1940s, '50s, '60s and '70s. His stories were mostly published in magazines such as Thrilling Wonder Stories, Astounding Stories, and Galaxy. His short story Noise Level is known as one of his best works and is considered to be a classic of the genre. Source: Wikipedia Young, Robert Franklin 1915 1986 en 2 1266 Robert Franklin Young, who published under the name Robert F. Young, was an American science fiction writer, who was born in 1915 and died in 1986. Except for the three and a half years he served in the Pacific during World War II, he spent most of his life in New York State. He owned a property on Lake Erie. He remained little known by the public, in the USA as well as abroad. His career spanned more than thirty years, and he wrote fiction until he died. Only near the end of his life did the science fiction community learn he had been a janitor in the Buffalo public school system. Barry N. Malzberg noted: if he was a writer working as a janitor, he likely lived a frustrating life, but if he was a janitor who happened to write, he lived a surprising and triumphant one. His production started in 1953 in Startling Stories, then Playboy, The Saturday Evening Post and Collier's. It mainly consisted of a long list of short stories with a poetic and romantic style that made him compared to Bradbury and Sturgeon. A good deal of these stories have been published in France by Galaxie, Fiction and the science fiction anthologies in the 'Livre de Poche'. His most famous short stories are perhaps "The Dandelion Girl", which influenced the director of the anime series RahXephon, and "Little Dog Gone", which was nominated in 1965 for the Hugo Award for Best Short Story. Source: Wikipedia Brackett, Leigh 1915 1978 en 1 1038 Leigh Brackett (December 7, 1915, in Los Angeles, California – March 18, 1978) was a writer of science fiction, mystery novels and — best known to the general public — Hollywood screenplays, most notably The Big Sleep (1945), Rio Bravo (1959), The Long Goodbye (1973) and The Empire Strikes Back (1980). Brackett's first published science fiction story was "Martian Quest", which appeared in the February 1940 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. Her earliest years as a writer (1940-1942) were her most productive in numbers of stories written; however, these works show a writer still engaged in mastering her craft. The first of her science fiction stories still attempt to emphasize a quasi-scientific angle, with problems resolved by an appeal to the (usually imaginary) chemical, biological, or physical laws of her invented worlds. As Brackett became more comfortable as an author, this element receded and was replaced by adventure stories with a strong touch of fantasy. Occasional stories have social themes, such as "The Citadel of Lost Ships" (1943), which considers the effects on the native cultures of alien worlds of Earth's expanding trade empire. Brackett's first novel, No Good from a Corpse, published in 1944, was a hard-boiled mystery novel in the tradition of Raymond Chandler. Hollywood director Howard Hawks was so impressed by this novel that he had his secretary call in "this guy Brackett" to help William Faulkner write the script for The Big Sleep (1946). The film, starring Humphrey Bogart and written by Leigh Brackett, William Faulkner, and Jules Furthman, is considered one of the best movies ever made in the genre. At the same time, Brackett's science fiction stories were becoming more ambitious. Shadow Over Mars (1944) was her first novel-length science fiction story, and though still somewhat rough-edged, marked the beginning of a new style, strongly influenced by the characterization of the 1940s detective story and film noir. Brackett's heroes from this period are tough, two-fisted, semi-criminal, ill-fated adventurers. Shadow's Rick Urquhart (reputedly modelled on Humphrey Bogart's shadier film characters) is a ruthless, selfish space drifter, who just happens to be caught in a web of political intrigue that accidentally places the fate of Mars in his hands. In 1946, the same year that Brackett married science fiction author Edmond Hamilton, Planet Stories published the novella "Lorelei of the Red Mist". Brackett only finished the first half before turning it over to Planet Stories' other acclaimed author, Ray Bradbury, so that she could leave to work on The Big Sleep. "Lorelei"'s main character is an out-and-out criminal, a thief called Hugh Starke. Though the story was well concluded by Bradbury, Brackett seems to have felt that her ideas in this story were insufficiently addressed, as she returns to them in later stories—particularly "Enchantress of Venus" (1949). Brackett returned from her break from science-fiction writing, caused by her cinematic endeavors, in 1948. From then on to 1951, she produced a series of science fiction adventure stories that were longer, more ambitious, and better written than her previous work. To this period belong such classic representations of her planetary settings as "The Moon that Vanished" and the novel-length Sea-Kings of Mars (1949), later published as The Sword of Rhiannon, a vivid description of Mars before its oceans evaporated. With "Queen of the Martian Catacombs" (1949), Brackett found for the first time a character that she cared to return to. Brackett's Eric John Stark is sometimes compared to Robert E. Howard's Conan, but is in many respects closer to Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan or Rudyard Kipling's Mowgli. Stark, an orphan from Earth, is raised by the semi-sentient aboriginals of Mercury, who are later killed by Earthmen. He is saved from the same fate by a Terran official, who adopts Stark and becomes his mentor. When threatened, however, Eric John Stark frequently reverts to the primitive N'Chaka, the "man without a tribe" that he was on Mercury. Thus, Stark is the archetypical modern man—a beast with a thin veneer of civilization. From 1949 to 1951, Stark (whose name obviously echoes that of the hero in "Lorelei") appeared in three tales, all published in Planet Stories; the aforementioned "Queen", "Enchantress of Venus", and finally "Black Amazon of Mars". With this last story Brackett's period of writing high adventure ends. Brackett's stories thereafter adopted a more elegiac tone. They no longer celebrate the conflicts of frontier worlds, but lament the passing away of civilizations. The stories now concentrate more upon mood than on plot. The reflective, retrospective nature of these stories is indicated in the titles: "The Last Days of Shandakor"; "Shannach — the Last"; "Last Call from Sector 9G". This last story was published in the very last issue (Summer 1955) of Planet Stories, always Brackett's most reliable market for science fiction. With the disappearance of Planet Stories and, later in 1955, of Startling Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories, the market for Brackett's brand of story dried up, and the first phase of her career as a science fiction author ended. A few other stories trickled out over the next decade, and old stories were revised and published as novels. A new production of this period was one of Brackett's most critically acclaimed science fiction novels, The Long Tomorrow (1955). This novel describes an agrarian, deeply technophobic society that develops after a nuclear war. But most of Brackett's writing after 1955 was for the more lucrative film and television markets. In 1963 and 1964, she briefly returned to her old Martian milieu with a pair of stories; "The Road to Sinharat" can be regarded as an affectionate farewell to the world of "Queen of the Martian Catacombs", while the other – with the intentionally ridiculous title of "Purple Priestess of the Mad Moon" – borders on parody. After another hiatus of nearly a decade, Brackett returned to science fiction in the seventies with the publication of The Ginger Star (1974), The Hounds of Skaith (1974), and The Reavers of Skaith (1976), collected as The Book of Skaith in 1976. This trilogy brought Eric John Stark back for adventures upon the extrasolar planet of Skaith (rather than his old haunts of Mars and Venus). Most of Brackett's science fiction can be characterized as space opera or planetary romance. Almost all of her planetary romances take place within a common invented universe, the Leigh Brackett Solar System, which contains richly detailed fictional versions of the consensus Mars and Venus of science fiction in the 1930s–1950s. Mars thus appears as a marginally habitable desert world, populated by ancient, decadent, and mostly humanoid races; Venus as a primitive, wet jungle planet, occupied by vigorous, primitive tribes and reptilian monsters. Brackett's Skaith combines elements of Brackett's other worlds with fantasy elements. The fact that the settings of Brackett's stories range from a rocket-crowded interplanetary space to the superstitious backwaters of primitive or decadent planets allows her a great deal of scope for variation in style and subject matter. In a single story, Brackett can veer from space opera to hard-boiled detective fiction to Western to the borders of Celtic-inspired fantasy. Brackett cannot, therefore, be easily classified as a Sword and planet science fantasy writer; though swords and spears may show up in the most primitive regions of her planets, guns, blasters and electric-shock generators are more common weapons. Though the influence of Edgar Rice Burroughs is apparent in Brackett's Mars stories, the differences between their versions of Mars are great. Brackett's Mars is set firmly in a world of interplanetary commerce and competition, and one of the most prominent themes of Brackett's stories is the clash of planetary civilizations; the stories both illustrate and criticize the effects of colonialism on civilizations which are either older or younger than those of the colonizers, and thus they have relevance to this day. Burroughs' heroes set out to remake entire worlds according to their own codes; Brackett's heroes (often anti-heroes) are at the mercy of trends and movements far bigger than they are. Source: Wikipedia Porges, Arthur 1915 2006 en 1 847 Arthur Porges, (20 August 1915, Chicago, Illinois – 12 May 2006) was an American author of numerous short stories, most notably in the 1950s and 1960s, though he continued to write and publish stories until his death. Wallace, Floyd L. 1915 2004 en 1 577 F. L. Wallace, sometimes credited as Floyd Wallace, was a noted science fiction and mystery writer. He was born in Rock Island, Illinois, in 1915, and died in Tustin, California, in 2004. Wallace spent most of his life in California as a writer and mechanical engineer after attending the University of Iowa. His first published story, "Hideaway," appeared in the magazine Astounding. Galaxy Science Fiction and other science fiction magazines published subsequent stories of his including "Delay in Transit," "Bolden's Pets," and "Tangle Hold." His mystery works include "Driving Lesson," a second-prize winner in the twelfth annual short story contest held by Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. His novel, Address: Centauri, was published by Gnome Press in 1955. His works have been translated into numerous languages and his stories are available today around the world in anthologies. Harness, Charles Leonard 1915 2005 en 1 502 Charles Leonard Harness (December 29, 1915 - September 20, 2005) was an American science fiction writer. He was born in Texas, earned degrees in chemistry and law, and worked as a patent attorney in Connecticut and Washington, DC, for 35 years. Harness' first story, "Time Trap" (1948), is unusual for a first story in that it shows many of his recurring themes, among them art, time travel, and a hero undergoing a quasi-transcendental experience. Several of Harness' works draw on his background as a lawyer. Among his best known stories are "The Rose", "An Ornament to his Profession", "The Alchemist", and "Stalemate in Time". Brian Aldiss mentioned Harness' Flight into Yesterday as a leading example of the "widescreen baroque" style in science fiction, along with Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man and The Stars My Destination. His story "The New Reality" has been called "SF's best Adam & Eve story" by Brian Stableford. His novel Redworld is one of the very few science fiction novels where all characters are aliens. Harness' ideas influenced numerous writers and he continued to write up to 2001, gathering nominations for multiple Hugo and Nebula awards. In 2004 he was named Author Emeritus by SFWA, but he declined the banquet invitation due to being unable to travel and was honored by SFWA as an "Author of Distinction". His admirers find his relative obscurity extremely perplexing. Source: Wikipedia