Lilith Lorraine (1894-1967)

Mary Maud Wright, daughter of John Beamon Dunn and Lelia Nias, was born in Corpus Christi, TX on 19 Mar 1894. She died in Corpus Christi on 9 Nov  1967. In 1912 she married Cleveland Lamar Wright, a cowboy, with whom she had x children.

Lorraine was most acclaimed as a poet, but she also contributed short stories to popular science fiction periodicals such as Amazing Stories, Astounding Stories of Super Science, Science Wonder, Thrilling Wonder and Wonder Stories.

She wrote one novelette, "The Brain of the Planet" in 1929. Her account of surface-effect vehicles was some 30 years in advance of their commercial development, and in one of her stories, "Into the 28th Century," she imagined the distant future for her hometown of Corpus Christi. It was during this time that she also began contributing to fanzines.

In the 1950s, she also published Challenge, credited as the first poetry periodical devoted to the science fiction and weird fiction genre. After her death, there was a revival of interest in her work. Her poetry was reprinted in literary zines such as Fantasy Macabre. Poetry editor Steve Sneyd (Data Dump) wrote "Lilith Lorraine: Postscript" for Fantasy Commentator (1999 #51) where he urged a reappraisal of her work. He also reported to It Goes On The Shelf #19 that he had received the file the F.B.I. had kept on Lilith Lorraine while she was alive.

C.S. Lewis (1898-1963)

Clive Staples "Jack" Lewis, son of James Lewis and Florence "Flora" Augusta Hamilton, was born in Belfast, Ireland on 29 Nov 1898. In 1956 he married Joy Davidman Gresham, who died 1960. He never remarried.

Lewis is known for his fictional works "The Screwtape Letters," "The Chronicles of Narnia" and "The Space Trilogy." The "Space Trilogy" (also called the "Cosmic Trilogy" or "Ransom Trilogy") dealt with what Lewis saw as the dehumanizing trends in contemporary science fiction:

• The first book, "Out of the Silent Planet," was apparently written following a conversation with his friend JRR Tolkien about these trends. Lewis agreed to write a "space travel" story and Tolkien a "time travel" one, but Tolkien never completed "The Lost Road", linking his Middle-earth to the modern world. Lewis's main character Elwin Ransom is based in part on Tolkien, a fact Tolkien alludes to in his letters. 
• The second novel, "Perelandra," depicts a new Garden of Eden on the planet Venus, a new Adam and Eve and a new "serpent figure" to tempt them. The story can be seen as an account of what could have happened if the terrestrial Eve had resisted the serpent's temptation and avoided the Fall of Man. 
• The third novel, "That Hideous Strength," develops the theme of nihilistic science threatening traditional human values, embodied in Arthurian legend.

Walter Hooper, Lewis's literary executor, discovered a fragment of another science-fiction novel by Lewis, "The Dark Tower." Ransom appears in the story but it is not clear whether the book was intended as part of the same series of novels. The manuscript was eventually published in 1977, though Lewis scholar Kathryn Lindskoog doubts its authenticity.

Lewis died in Oxford, England on 22 Nov 1963. Media coverage of his death was almost completely overshadowed by news of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, which occurred on the same day, as did the death of Aldous Huxley, author of "Brave New World." This coincidence was the inspiration for Peter Kreeft's book "Between Heaven and Hell: A Dialog Somewhere Beyond Death with John F. Kennedy, C. S. Lewis, & Aldous Huxley."

Kurd Lasswitz (1848-1910)

Kurd Lasswitz was born in Bresslau, Germany on 29 Apr 1848. He died in Gotha, Germany on 17 Oct 1910. A German author, scientist and philosopher, he sometimes used the pseudonym Velatus. For his writing (totalling around 420 works including non-fiction), he has been called "the father of German science fiction", "the first utopistic-scientific writer in Germany" or even "a German Jules Verne".

His first published science fiction story was "Bis zum Nullpunkt des Seins" (To the Zero Point of Existence, 1871) which depicted life in 2371. But he earned his reputation with his 1897 novel "Auf zwei Planeten," which describes an encounter between humans and a Martian civilization that is older and more advanced. The book has the Martian race running out of water, eating synthetic foods, travelling by rolling roads and utilizing space stations. (It was published the same year as War of the Worlds.)

His spaceships use anti-gravity, but travel realistic orbital trajectories and use occasional mid-course corrections in travelling between Mars and the Earth. Lasswitz depicted the technically correct transit between the orbits of two planets, something poorly understood by other early science fiction writers. It was translated into English in 1971 as "Two Planets".

His last book was "Sternentau: die Pflanze vom Neptunsmond" (Star Dew: the Plant of Neptune's Moon, 1909). A crater on Mars was named in his honor, as was the asteroid 46514 Lasswitz.

Caption Left: "Dort ist meine Heimat. (There is my homeland.)." Drawing by W. Zeeden from abridged centenary edition (1948) of Auf zwei Planeten.

Murray Leinster (1896-1975)

William Fitzgerald Jenkins, son of George B. Jenkins and Mary L., was born in Norfolk, VA on 16 Jun 1896. In 1921 he married Mary Mandola with whom he had four daughters. Jenkins died in Gloucester, VA on 8 Jun 1975.

He wrote under the pen names of Murray Leinster (the name used for the rest of this biography), William Fitzgerald, Louisa Carter Lee, Will F. Jenkins and Fitzgerald Jenkins. He wrote and published more than 1,500 short stories and articles, 14 movie scripts and hundreds of radio scripts and television plays. He was also an inventor (using his given name), best known for the front projection process used in special effects.

Leinster was two months short of his 20th birthday when his first story, "The Foreigner", appeared in the May 1916 issue of H. L. Mencken's literary magazine The Smart Set. Over the next three years, he published ten more stories in that magazine. During and after World War I, he began appearing in pulp magazines like Argosy, Snappy Stories and Breezy Stories. He continued to appear regularly in Argosy into the 1950s. When the pulp magazines began to diversify into particular genres in the 1920s, Leinster followed suit, selling jungle stories to Danger Trails, westerns to West and Cowboy Stories, detective stories to Black Mask and Mystery Stories, horror stories to Weird Tales ... even romance stories to Love Story Magazine under the pen name Louisa Carter Lee.

Hear it HERE

His first science fiction story, "The Runaway Skyscraper", appeared in the February 22, 1919 issue of Argosy and was reprinted in the June 1926 issue of Hugo Gernsback's first science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories. In the 1930s, he published several science fiction stories and serials in Amazing and Astounding Stories (the first issue of Astounding included his story "Tanks"). He continued to appear frequently in other genre pulps such as Detective Fiction Weekly and Smashing Western, as well as Collier's Weekly beginning in 1936 and Esquire starting in 1939.

Leinster is credited with the invention of parallel universe stories. Four years before Jack Williamson's "The Legion of Time" came out, Leinster published his "Sidewise in Time" in the June 1934 issue of Astounding. Leinster's vision of extraordinary oscillations in time ('sidewise in time') had a long-term impact on other authors: Isaac Asimov's "Living Space", "The Red Queen's Race" and "The End of Eternity."

His 1945 novella "First Contact" is also credited as one of the first (if not the first) instances of a universal translator in science fiction.

Leinster was one of the few science fiction writers from the 1930s to survive in the John W. Campbell era of higher writing standards, publishing over three dozen stories in Astounding and Analog under Campbell's editorship. The last story by Leinster in Analog was "Quarantine World" in the November 1966 issue, 36 years after his appearance in the premier January 1930 issue.

His 1946 short story "A Logic Named Joe" contains one of the first descriptions of a computer (called a "logic") in fiction. In the story, Leinster was decades ahead of his time in imagining the Internet. He envisioned logics in every home, linked through a distributed system of servers (called "tanks"), to provide communications, entertainment, data access, and commerce; one character says that "logics are civilization."

After World War II, when both his name and the pulps had achieved a wider acceptance, he would use either "William Fitzgerald", "Fitzgerald Jenkins" or "Will F. Jenkins" as names on stories when "Leinster" had already sold a piece to a particular issue.

Leinster continued publishing in the 1950s and 1960s, appearing in Galaxy Magazine and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, as well as The Saturday Evening Post. He won a Hugo Award for his 1956 story "Exploration Team". He ended his writing career writing novelizations of episodes of the science fiction series "Men into Space," "The Time Tunnel" and "Land of the Giants."

Georges Melies (1861-1938)

Marie-Georges-Jean Melies, son of Jean-Louis-Stanislas Milies and Johannah-Catherine Schuering, was born in Paris, France on 8 Dec 1861 and died there on 21 Jan 1938.

He married first to Eugenie Genin with whom he had two children: Georgette and Andre. After Eugenie's death he married his mistress, Jeanne d'Alcy.

In 1884 his parents sent him to England to continue his studies and learn English in order to work at his father's footwear business. While in London, he developed a keen interest in stage conjury after witnessing the work of Maskelyne and Cooke. On his return to Paris he worked at his father’s factory and took over as manager when his father retired. His position meant that he was able to raise enough money to buy the famous Theatre Robert Houdin when it was put up for sale in 1888.

From that point on Méliès worked full time as a theatrical showman whose performances revolved around magic and illusionist techniques which he studied while in London as well as working on his own tricks. When the Lumière brothers unveiled their Cinématographe to the public on December 28 1895 Méliès was a member of the audience. What he witnessed clearly had a profound effect upon him. After the show he approached the Lumière Brothers with a view to buying their machine - they turned him down.

Determined to investigate moving pictures, Méliès sought out Robert Paul in London and viewed his camera - projector building his own, soon afterwards. He was able to present his first film screening on April 4th 1896. By accident, he discovered that he could use stop-motion photography to render trick visual effects. He was also the first to use techniques such as the fade-in, the fade-out, and the dissolve to create the first real narrative films.

Méliès’ principle contribution to cinema was the combination of traditional theatrical elements to motion pictures - he sought to present spectacles of a kind not possible in live theatre.

In the Autumn of 1896, an event occurred which has since passed into film folklore and changed the way Méliès looked at filmmaking. While filming a simple street scene, Méliès camera jammed and it took him a few seconds to rectify the problem. Thinking no more about the incident, Méliès processed the film and was struck by the effect such a incident had on the scene - objects suddenly appeared, disappeared or were transformed into other objects.

From this incident he discovered that cinema had the capacity for manipulating and distorting time and space. He expanded upon his initial ideas and devised some complex special effects. He tackled a wide range of subjects as well as the fantasy films usually associated with him, including advertising films and serious dramas. 

Trained in classic 18th century theater, Melies conceived all of his films in terms of fully played-out scenes. He was one of the first filmmakers to present nudity on screen with Apres le Bal (1897). He also pioneered the first double exposure film (La caverne maudite, 1898), the first split screen film with performers acting opposite themselves (Un Homme de tete, 1898) and the first dissolve film (Cendrillon, 1899). Melies made over 500 films ... financing, directing, photographing and starring in nearly every one of them. But his most famous is Le Voyage dans la lune (Voyage to the Moon, 1902). 

Faced with a shrinking market once the novelty of his films began to wear off, Méliès abandoned film production in 1912. In 1915 he was forced to turn his innovative studio into a Variety Theatre and resumed his pre-film career as a showman.

Unable to keep up with the changing industry, the end of his life was wrought with poverty. In 1923 he was declared bankrupt and his beloved Theatre Robert Houdin was demolished. He almost disappeared into obscurity until the late 1920s when his substantial contribution to cinema was recognized by the French and he was presented with the Legion of Honour and given a rent free apartment where he spent the remaining years of his life. 

Le Voyage dans la Lune (1902)

Naomi Mitchison (1897-1999)

Naomi May Margaret Haldane, daughter of John Scott Haldane and Louise Kathleen Trotter, was born in Edinburg, England on 1 Nov 1897. She died in Carradale in Kintyre, England on 11 Jan 1999. In 1916 she married the barrister Gilbert Richard Mitchison with whom she had 7 children: Geoffrey, Denis, Murdoch, Avrion, Louis, Valentine and Clemency.

In 1891 she was appointeed CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) and was also entitled to call herself Lady Mitchison, CBE since October 1964 (but apparently never used that style herself). She was a prolific writer, completing more than 90 books in her lifetime, across a multitude of styles and genres.

Later works included science fiction novels such as "Memoirs of a Spacewoman" (1962) and "Solution Three (1975).

Memoirs of a Spacewoman ...

The Spacewoman in question is a scientist and explorer. It's set many centuries in the future, though no dates are given. Humans have explored many worlds in a number of different galaxies. The quest is for knowledge and to be helpful: there is a strict rule against 'interference'.

The narrator, whose name is Mary, is a specialist in 'communication' - a kind of telepathy. She operates in a society where woman are just as likely as men to be leaders, though she herself prefers not to lead. They also do pretty much as they please as regards sex and reproduction:

"I think of my friends and the fathers of my children. I think about my children, but I think less about my four dear normals than I think about Viola. And I think about Ariel."

Viola is a haploid human, conceived as a result of sexual interaction with a Martian - Martians being hermaphrodite. Ariel is an alien creature that could be seen either as a parasite or a kind of child.

There are no space-opera thrills and fights: rather there are a number of different worlds with interesting biologies. In one case there is an ethical problem concerning some caterpillars and butterflies, both intelligent. Attitudes about sex and about alien cultures are similar to those of the New Wave, though it is not normally classed as part of it.