| authors asher
ashley
bayley
bennett
brooke
brown
butler
carroll
christopher
clute
cole
collins
FEARN
grant
harbottle
high
hutchinson
langford
platt
schweitzer
silverberg
singleton
stross
stableford
tubb
wallace
artists
halkon
van hollander
lindroos
maverick
wojtowicz
editor
wallace
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J.R. Fearn began
his career as a science fiction writer
in the American pulp magazines in 1933, when his first
novel THE INTELLIGENCE GIGANTIC was
serialised in
AMAZING STORIES. The following year he
sold a short
story, “The Man Who Stopped the Dust” to ASTOUNDING
STORIES, the first of many outstanding “thought
variants”
he was to contribute over the next several years.
By the early 1940s,
Fearn had appeared in all of the
leading magazines under his own name and numerous
pseudonyms, creating a variety of plot-forms under
different styles that ranged from universe-destroying
thought variants to the intensely human stories. His
most popular pen names were Thornton Ayre
and
Polton Cross. As Ayre he created the
first female
super-heroine, Violet Ray - “The Golden Amazon”
-
with four stories in FANTASTIC ADVENTURES
(1939-43).
In 1944, Fearn
completely revised his Amazon concept,
upgrading his writing from the pulp level, and broke
into the hardcover market in Britain with THE
GOLDEN
AMAZON. In the novel version, a baby girl is the
unwitting subject of an idealistic scientist’s
glandular
experiments, his aim being to end world wars by
creating a superwoman who would institute a benign
scientific rule upon reaching maturity. But the
apparently successful experiment has a flaw. With
her supernatural strength and scientific gifts, the
Amazon grows up with a hatred for men and a
ruthless cruelty. The Amazon brings the world to
its knees, elevating women to positions of power.
She is planning to supersede men as a species
when she is seen to suddenly collapse and die, her
supernatural energy burning itself out.
THE GOLDEN
AMAZON was reprinted in the Canadian
magazine the TORONTO STAR WEEKLY in 1945,
and
proved so popular with the magazine’s predominantly
female readership that Fearn was commissioned to
bring the Amazon hack to life for a whole series of
sequels. These were tremendously successful and
appeared regularly in the STAR WEEKLY
over the
next 16 years. ending only with Fearn’s death. The
novels were syndicated to several American newspapers,
with the early novels appearing in both hardcover and
paperback in the UK and Canada respectively.
Having found a more
lucrative market, Fearn quit writing
for the pulp magazines. He wrote detective novels as John
Slate, beginning with BLACK MARIA, M.A.
in 1944. The
book was acknowledged as a classic of the “locked
room
murder” genre, and reviewers hailed ‘Slate”
as a second
Agatha Christie. Writing as Hugo Blayn. Fearn created a
scientific detective. Dr. Carruthers, many of whose
adventures
blur into science fiction, notably WHAT HAPPENED
TO
HAMMOND? (1951) featuring a matter transmitter.
Fearn
also became a very successful and prolific writer of
Westerns,
of which his “Merridrew” series is particularly
noted.
In 1950, Fearn was
commissioned to write a long series of
science fiction paperbacks for the British publisher Scion
Ltd,
under the contractual pen name of “Vargo
Statten.” The
very first novel ANNIHILATION (1950)
became a best-seller
and launched a new craze for science fiction in Britain.
The
dramatic cover by artist Ron Turner
immediately proclaimed
the contents: the Earth wracked by a series of solar
storms,
causing the remnants of a doomed humanity to try and
escape
into space. For many people in post-war Britain, this was
their
first exposure to science fiction, and the combination of
an
exciting story and vivid artwork made a lasting
impression.
The Statten series ran
to some 52 hooks, and Fearn also
wrote a further dozen similar titles for the same
publisher
as “Volsted Gridban.” These
novels were reprinted all
over Europe, particularly in France and Italy. In the
1970s
and 1980s, such was Fearn’s posthumous popularity in
ltaly,
that his detective and western novels were also
translated
alongside his science fiction titles. In the UK, his name
was
kept alive by occasional anthology reprints of some of
his
classic pulp short stories, and Fearn’s biographer, Philip
Harbottle, also issued a number of privately
printed collectable
chapbooks, some of which were posthumous first editions.
More recently several westerns were reprinted (in large
print paperback editions by F. A. Thorpe).
which are still
in print.
In the U.S.A.. a full-scale
Fearn revival got underway in
1995, when Gryphon Books reprinted four
sf novels from
1950 in uniform editions, illustrated by Ron
Turner - the
EMPEROR OF MARS series. These were
successful, and led
to the creation of the Gryphon SF Rediscovery Series,
which
had reached 25 titles (all of them first U.S. editions)
by the
beginning of 1999. and is still ongoing. The series
includes
some world first editions as well as reprints, and
features
works by E.C.Tubb, Jack Williamson,
and Don Wilcox;
about half of their titles have been by Fearn. His most
recent
new Gryphon title is THE SLITHERERS. In
1996 Gryphon
began the systematic reprinting of the entire GOLDEN
AMAZON series. Their forthcoming 1999 editions
of
TRIANGLE OF POWER (#9) and THE AMETHYST
CITY
(#10), and all subsequent titles in this 26 novel series
will
be world first editions of stories which have hitherto
only
appeared in magazine and newspaper form.
All copyright in the
works of John Russell Fearn is vested
in the Cosmos Literary Agency, to whom
all enquiries for
reprinting and foreign translations should be addressed.
A
limited number of chapbooks including THE INNER
COSMOS,
SURVIVOR OF MARS, FROM
AFAR, CLIMATE INCORPORATED,
and others, are still available from the Cosmos
Literary
Agency, at $5.00 each, post free.
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