Gardner, Erle Stanley
Entry updated 26 February 2024. Tagged: Author.
(1889-1970) US lawyer and author, most famous for the eighty-two volume Perry Mason detective series beginning with The Case of the Velvet Claws (1933). He had been extremely prolific from the start of his career around 1921, publishing at least 60 stories and a novel in Pulp magazines in 1933 alone; he spent almost no time at all on sf. His first story of genre interest was "Rain Magic" for (20 October 1928 Argosy All-Story Weekly); of some note were "Monkey Eyes" (3 August 1929 Argosy All-Story Weekly), which is an Apes as Human tale, and "A Year in a Day" (19 July 1930 Argosy), a Time Distortion tale closely modeled on H G Wells's "The New Accelerator" (December 1901 Strand); his last was "The Human Zero" (19 December 1931 Argosy). These tales are all assembled as The Human Zero: The Science Fiction Stories of Erle Stanley Gardner (coll 1981) edited by Martin H Greenberg and Charles G Waugh. They are efficient but unmemorable pulp sf, and now seem both dim and mechanical. [JC]
Erle Stanley Gardner
born Malden, Massachusetts: 17 July 1889
died Temecula, California: 11 March 1970
works
- The Human Zero: The Science Fiction Stories of Erle Stanley Gardner (New York: William Morrow, 1981) edited by Martin H Greenberg and Charles G Waugh [coll: hb/Honie Werner]
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