deeds of the creators
(and events in their lives)

Leigh Brackett (in the middle) during The Big Sleep shoot

This is intended to grow like the other add-on pages - such as the Diary, the Gazetteer and Fictional Dates - into an expanding tribute to the brilliant eruption of awareness that shone via sf onto humanity during the first two-thirds of the twentieth century.  Here, the emphasis will be on the creators as people; what they did and what was done to them in their involvements in the real world.

(As with some other pages, particularly the Fictional Dates, here the topic will spill over from the Old Solar System to the sf greats in general, because I shan't wish to exclude information about an author just because he or she is more interstellar than OSS.)

John Jacob Astor IV, author of A Journey in Other Worlds, was the richest passenger on board the Titanic, and died in the disaster.

In the summer of 1912 Clark Ashton Smith visited his mentor the poet George Sterling in Carmel.

Ray Cummings worked as an assistant to Thomas Alva Edison, 1914-19.

In 1919 Edward E Smith was hired as chief chemist for F. W. Stock & Sons of Hillsdale, Michigan, working on doughnut mixes.

H P Lovecraft moved to New York.  (To his two years there we owe The Horror At Red Hook.)

Jack Williamson and Edmond Hamilton travelled down the Mississippi in an open boat.

July 1934:  H G Wells was granted an interview with Stalin.

Wells I am very much obliged to you, Mr Stalin, for agreeing to see me. I was in the United States recently. I had a long conversation with President Roosevelt and tried to ascertain what his leading ideas were. Now I have come to ask you what you are doing to change the world...

Stalin Not so very much.

Wells I wander around the world as a common man and, as a common man, observe what is going on around me...      

[Wells, chairman of PEN, unsuccessfully tried to get Stalin to join this literary society.]

Eric Frank Russell and his wife Ellen sailed across the Atlantic on the steamer S.S.Aquitania from Southampton to New York; he attended the New York World's Fair and during 2-4 July the first World Science Fiction Convention.

7th December 1941:  Edgar Rice Burroughs witnessed the attack on Pearl Harbor, initially mistaking it for a training exercise.

22nd April 1964, New York City: first face-to-face meeting between Arthur C Clarke and Stanley Kubrick; they discussed ideas for a film that would become 2001. 

Patrick Moore, the new director of Armagh Planetarium, went to join the local cricket club; the result is recounted by Moore in his 2003 autobiography 80 Not Out.
    ...I met the Secretary, who asked me several questions:
    "Are you a bat, a bowler or an all-rounder?"
    "Purely a bowler; leg-spin, medium pace.  No. 11 bat."
    "Good; we need a spinner.  Are you Protestant or Catholic?"
    I looked at him in amazement.  "What on earth does that matter?"
    "Of course it matters here.  It makes a lot of difference."
    I rose to my feet.  "I'm a Druid.  Good afternoon." - and I never went near the Pavilion again...                  

>>  Authors