Science Fiction of the forties

Frederik Pohl, Jr. was born in Brooklyn, New York. His father held a number of jobs, and his family moved many times in his childhood before settling in Brooklyn when he was about seven. He attended Brooklyn Tech high school, but dropped out and took a job to help support his family. As a teen, he founded the New York science fiction writer's group The Futurians. His first publication, a poem, appeared in Amazing Stories in 1937, when he was 18 years old. In 1936, he joined the Young Commun...

Martin Harry Greenberg (March 1, 1941 – June 25, 2011) was an American academic and anthologist in many genres, including mysteries and horror, but especially in speculative fiction. In all, he compiled 1,298 anthologies and commissioned over 8,200 original short stories. He founded Tekno Books, a packager of more than 2000 published books. He was also a co-founder of the Sci-Fi Channel. Greenberg was also an expert in terrorism and the Middle East. He was a longtime friend, colleague and busine...

Joseph D. Olander is the author of Galaxy, a science fiction novel. He writes stories that explore the vastness of space and the human condition within it.

Raymond Z. Gallun was a writer whose stories appeared in pulp magazines like Startling Stories. His work often featured in collections such as Adventure House Presents. He was known for his adventure tales.

Asimov was born sometime between October 4, 1919 and January 2, 1920 in Petrovichi in Smolensk Oblast, RSFSR (now Russia), the son of a Jewish family of millers. Although his exact date of birth is uncertain, Asimov himself celebrated it on January 2. His family emigrated to Brooklyn, New York and opened a candy store when he was three years old. He taught himself to read at the age of five. He began reading the science fiction pulp magazines that his family's store carried. Around the age of...

Nelson S. Bond is a writer whose work you'll find in collections like Fantastic Stories Presents the Weird Tales Super Pack #2. He's a name associated with speculative fiction, particularly the kind that leans into the strange and fantastic.

Cyril M. Kornbluth was a writer of sharp, often satirical science fiction. His collection, Fifty Short Science Fiction Tales, showcases his skill with the genre.

Lester del Rey was born Leonard Knapp in Saratoga, Minnesota, the son of poor sharecroppers of partly Spanish ancestry. His mother died shortly after his birth, and he managed to complete high school and two years at George Washington University before dropping out for economic reasons. He started publishing stories in pulp magazines in the late 1930s. He was closely associated Astounding Science Fiction, then the leading science fiction magazine. In 1935, his first wife was killed in a car ac...

Murray Leinster was a pen name of William Fitzgerald Jenkins (June 16, 1896 – June 8, 1975), 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.

Leigh Brackett was born in in Los Angeles, California and raised near Santa Monica. She spent her youth as an athletic tom-boy, playing volleyball and reading stories by Edgar Rice Burroughs and H. Rider Haggard. She began writing fantastic adventures of her own, and her first published science fiction story was "Martian Quest", which appeared in the February 1940 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. Her first novel, No Good from a Corpse (1944), was a hard-boiled mystery novel. This novel i...

C. L. Moore is the author behind the classic sword and sorcery collection, Swords Against Darkness. If you enjoy tales of adventure and magic, you'll want to check out their work.

Cleve E. Cartmill was an American writer of science fiction and fantasy short stories. He is best remembered for what is sometimes referred to as "the Cleve Cartmill affair", when his 1944 story "Deadline" attracted the attention of the FBI by reason of its detailed description of a nuclear weapon similar to that being developed by the highly classified Manhattan Project. - Wikipedia

Clifford Donald Simak (August 3, 1904 – April 25, 1988) was an American science fiction writer. He won three Hugo Awards and one Nebula Award.The Science Fiction Writers of America made him its third SFWA Grand Master,[4] and the Horror Writers Association made him one of three inaugural winners of the Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement.[5] He is associated with the pastoral science fiction subgenre.

Frederic Brown is the author of the science fiction novel Young Mutants. He's known for his sharp, often darkly humorous stories that play with big ideas. If you enjoy thought-provoking sci-fi, you'll want to check out his work.

Ray Bradbury is one of those rare individuals whose writing has changed the way people think. His more than five hundred published works -- short stories, novels, plays, screenplays, television scripts, and verse -- exemplify the American imagination at its most creative. Once read, his words are never forgotten. His best-known and most beloved books, The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, Fahrenheit 451 and Something Wicked This Way Comes, are masterworks that readers carry wi...

Sir Arthur Charles Clarke CBE FRAS was a British science fiction writer, science writer and futurist, inventor, undersea explorer, and television series host. He is famous for being co-writer of the screenplay for the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, widely considered to be one of the most influential films of all time. Clarke was a science writer, who was both an avid populariser of space travel and a futurist of uncanny ability. On these subjects he wrote over a dozen books and many essays,...

Theodore Sturgeon was born Edward Hamilton Waldo in Staten Island, New York. He changed his name in 1929, choosing Sturgeon to match his mother's surname after her second marriage, and "Theodore" to match his nickname, "Teddy." His mother, Christine Hamilton Dicker Sturgeon, was a well-educated writer, watercolorist, and poet who published journalism, poetry and fiction under the pseudonym Felix Sturgeon. As an adolescent, Sturgeon wanted to be a circus acrobat, but then had an episode of r...

Chandler Davis is the author of The Golden Years of Science Fiction -- Fifth Series. This work explores the science fiction genre.

Robert Anson Heinlein was an American science fiction writer. Often called "the dean of science fiction writers", he was one of the most popular, influential, and controversial authors of the genre. He set a high standard for science and engineering plausibility and helped to raise the genre's standards of literary quality. He was one of the first writers to break into mainstream, general magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, in the late 1940s, with unvarnished science fiction. He was amo...

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 married literary agent Virginia Kidd in 1947. He worked for the Tobacco Institute from 1962-1968. In 1968, he emigrated to England. Between 1967 and hi...

Damon Knight was born in Baker City, Oregon. He graduated from the WPA Art Center in Salem, Oregon, then moved to New York City. His first story, "Resilience", was published in 1941. In 1943 he went into publishing, first with Popular Publications, then editing Beyond in 1950-51 and If in 1959-60. He became a science fiction critic in 1945, but gave that up in 1954. In 1956 he co-founded the Milford Science Fiction Writers' Conference. Also in 1956, he received the Hugo Award for science f...

Henry Kuttner was an American author of science fiction, fantasy and horror.

Judith Merril was a science fiction writer whose work, like her notable collection Galaxy, often explored the human side of technological change. She was a key figure in the science fiction community, known for her thoughtful and often challenging stories.

William Tenn is a science fiction writer whose work is celebrated for its wit and sharp observations. You'll find his stories collected in Fifty Short Science Fiction Tales, a great place to start if you enjoy clever, thought-provoking science fiction.

Alfred Elton van Vogt was born on a farm in Edenburg, a Russian Mennonite community east of Gretna, Manitoba. Early in his career he wrote for true confession pulp magazines like True Story, but in the late 1930s he began writing science fiction, which he was more interested in. His first published SF story, "Black Destroyer" was published in 1939, and is considered to be one of the first works of the Golden Age of science fiction. In 1941 he left his job at the Department of National Defence to...