Leinster, Murray 1896 1975 en 22 22981 Murray Leinster (June 16, 1896 - June 8, 1975) was the nom de plume of William Fitzgerald Jenkins, an American science fiction and alternate history writer. He was born in Norfolk, Virginia. During World War I, he served with the Committee of Public Information and the United States Army (1917-1918). Following the war, Leinster became a free-lance writer. In 1921, he married Mary Mandola. They had four daughters. During World War II, he served in the Office of War Information. He won the Liberty Award in 1937 for "A Very Nice Family," the 1956 Hugo Award for Best Novelette for "Exploration Team," a retro-Hugo in 1996 for Best Novelette for "First Contact." Leinster was the Guest of Honor at the 21st Worldcon in 1963. In 1995, the Sidewise Award for Alternate History was established, named after Leinster's story "Sidewise in Time." Leinster wrote and published over 1,500 short stories and articles over the course of his career. He wrote 14 movie and hundreds of radio scripts and television plays, inspiring several series including "Land of the Giants" and "The Time Tunnel". Leinster first began appearing in the late 1910s in pulp magazines like Argosy and then sold to Astounding Stories in the 1930s on a regular basis. After World War II, when both his name and the pulps had achieved a wider acceptance, he would use either "William Fitzgerald" or "Will F. Jenkins" as names on stories when "Leinster" had already sold a piece to a particular issue. He was very prolific and successful in the fields of western, mystery, horror, and especially science fiction. His novel Miners in the Sky transfers the lawless atmosphere of the California Gold Rush, a common theme of Westerns, into an asteroid environment. He is credited with the invention of parallel universe stories. Four years before Jack Williamson's The Legion of Time came out, Leinster wrote his "Sidewise in Time", which was first published in Astounding in June 1934. This was probably the first time that the strange concept of alternate worlds appeared in modern science-fiction. In a sidewise path of time some cities never happened to be built. Leinster's vision of nature's extraordinary oscillations in time ('sidewise in time') had long-term effect on other authors, e.g., Isaac Asimov's "Living Space", "The Red Queen's Race", or his famous The End of Eternity. Murray Leinster's 1946 short story "A Logic Named Joe" describes Joe, a "logic", that is to say, a computer. This is one of the first descriptions of a computer in fiction. In this story Leinster was decades ahead of his time in imagining the Internet. He envisioned logics in every home, linked to provide communications, data access, and commerce. In fact, one character said that "logics are civilization." In 2000, Leinster's heirs sued Paramount Pictures over the film Star Trek: First Contact, claiming that as the owners of the rights to Leinster's short story "First Contact", it infringed their trademark in the term. The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia granted Paramount's motion for summary judgment and dismissed the suit (see Estate of William F. Jenkins v. Paramount Pictures Corp., 90 F. Supp. 2d 706 (E.D. Va. 2000) for the full text of the court's ruling). The court found that regardless of whether Leinster's story first coined "first contact", it has since become a generic (and therefore unprotectable) term that described the overall genre of science fiction in which humans first encounter alien species. Even if the title was instead "descriptive"—a category of terms higher than "generic" that may be protectable—there was no evidence that the title had the required association in the public's mind (known as "secondary meaning") such that its use would normally be understood as referring to Leinster's story. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the lower court's dismissal without comment. William F. Jenkins was also an inventor, best known for the front projection process used for special effects in motion pictures and television in place of the older rear projection process and as an alternative to bluescreen. Source: Wikipedia Wodehouse, P. G. 1881 1975 en 2 8230 Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, KBE (15 October 1881 – 14 February 1975) was a comic writer who enjoyed enormous popular success during a career of more than seventy years and continues to be widely read. Despite the political and social upheavals that occurred during his life, much of which was spent in France and the United States, Wodehouse's main canvas remained that of pre-war English upper-class society, reflecting his birth, education, and youthful writing career. An acknowledged master of English prose, Wodehouse has been admired both by contemporaries such as Hilaire Belloc, Evelyn Waugh and Rudyard Kipling and by modern writers such as Douglas Adams, Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith and Terry Pratchett. Sean O'Casey famously called him "English literature's performing flea", a description that Wodehouse used as the title of a collection of his letters to a friend, Bill Townend. Best known today for the Jeeves and Blandings Castle novels and short stories, Wodehouse was also a playwright and lyricist who was part author and writer of 15 plays and of 250 lyrics for some 30 musical comedies. He worked with Cole Porter on the musical Anything Goes (1934) and frequently collaborated with Jerome Kern and Guy Bolton. He wrote the lyrics for the hit song "Bill" in Kern's Show Boat (1927), wrote lyrics to Sigmund Romberg's music for the Gershwin - Romberg musical Rosalie (1928), and collaborated with Rudolf Friml on a musical version of The Three Musketeers (1928). Source: Wikipedia Blish, James 1921 1975 en 1 1530 James Benjamin Blish (East Orange, New Jersey, May 23, 1921 – Henley-on-Thames, July 30, 1975) was an American author of fantasy and science fiction. Blish also wrote criticism of science fiction using the pen-name William Atheling Jr. In the late 1930's to the early 1940's, Blish was a member of the Futurians. Blish trained as a biologist at Rutgers and Columbia University, and spent 1942–1944 as a medical technician in the U.S. Army. After the war he became the science editor for the Pfizer pharmaceutical company. His first published story appeared in 1940, and his writing career progressed until he gave up his job to become a professional writer. He is credited with coining the term gas giant, in the story "Solar Plexus" as it appeared in the anthology Beyond Human Ken, edited by Judith Merril. (The story was originally published in 1941, but that version did not contain the term; Blish apparently added it in a rewrite done for the anthology, which was first published in 1952.) Blish was married to the literary agent Virginia Kidd from 1947 to 1963. Between 1967 and his death in 1975, Blish became the first author to write short story collections based upon the classic TV series Star Trek. In total, Blish wrote 11 volumes of short stories adapted from episodes of the 1960s TV series, as well as an original novel, Spock Must Die! in 1970 — the first original novel for adult readers based upon the series (since then hundreds more have been published). He died midway through writing Star Trek 12; his wife, J. A. Lawrence, completed the book, and later completed the adaptations in the volume Mudd's Angels. Blish lived in Milford, Pennsylvania at Arrowhead until the mid-1960s. In 1968, Blish emigrated to England, and lived in Oxford until his death from lung cancer in 1975. He is buried in Holywell Cemetery, Oxford, near the grave of Kenneth Grahame. Source: Wikipedia Kelleam, Joseph Everidge 1913 1975 en 1 733 Joseph Everidge Kelleam (1913-1975), born in Boswell, Oklahoma, was an American writer. His first story, "Rust", appeared in Astounding Science Fiction in 1939. Source: Wikipedia