Back to entry: farley_ralph_milne | Show links black

Farley, Ralph Milne

Pseudonym of US constitutional lawyer, author and teacher Roger Sherman Hoar (1887-1963) for all his sf work except two 1938 stories published in Amazing as by Lt John Pease. Hoar was educated at Harvard and had a remarkably varied career, which included teaching such subjects as mathematics and engineering, inventing a system of aiming large guns by the stars, and serving as a Massachusetts state senator. His early sf work in the Pulp magazines was written in obvious imitation of Edgar Rice Burroughs and was contributed to The Argosy – his first work of genre interest being The Radio Man (28 June-19 July 1924 Argosy All-Story Weekly; 1948; vt An Earthman on Venus 1950), the first instalment of his most famous series, the Radio Man Planetary Romances featuring Miles Cabot, which continued with The Radio Beasts (21 March-11 April 1925 Argosy; 1964), The Radio Planet (26 June-24 July 1926 Argosy All-Story Weekly; 1964), The Radio War (2-30 July Argosy All-Story Weekly; 2006), The Radio Minds (June 1939 Argosy All-Story Weekly; 2008) and "The Radio Minds of Mars" (June 1955 Spaceway, part 1 only; full text January-September/October 1969 Spaceway). The sequence, at first absurdly boosted by The Argosy as scientifically accurate, is devoted to the adventures of Cabot, mostly on Venus, the Radio Planet. After being accidentally shifted to that planet via Matter Transmitter, Cabot quickly frees its humanoid inhabitants from domination by an ant-like race; after marrying a human princess, he continues his activities ad libitum, though sometimes his son takes over.

Other Radio stories, indirectly connected to the main series, include The Radio Flyers (11 May-8 June 1929 Argosy All-Story Weekly; 2009) and The Radio Gun-Runners (22 February-29 March 1930 Argosy; 2016), both of which are Lost Race tales. A short novel, "The Hidden Universe" (November-December 1939 Amazing) – assembled with "We, the Mist" (August 1940 Amazing as "The Living Mist") as The Hidden Universe (coll 1950) and later assembled with The Radio Man as Strange Worlds (omni 1953) – is a crude but effective Pocket Universe tale: an evil Mad-Scientist magnate tricks people into emigrating to a Utopian planet, which turns out to be a warehouse on Earth, for he has shrunken them by a factor of 32 (see Great and Small) as part of a plan to gain absolute power. Along with another title, The Hidden Universe (November-December 1939 Amazing; with "We, the Mist" as coll 1950), The Radio Man was later assembled as Strange Worlds (omni 1953). "Farley" was a rough-hewn, traditional Sense-of-Wonder writer, and became relatively inactive as the genre became more sophisticated after World War Two. [JC/PN]

see also: Aliens; Comics; Eschatology; History of SF; Hive Minds; Time Paradoxes; Time Travel.

Roger Sherman Hoar

born Waltham, Massachusetts: 8 April 1887

died South Milwaukee, Wisconsin: 10 October 1963

works

series

Miles Cabot/Radio Man

individual titles

collections and stories

links

Entry from The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (2011-current) edited by John Clute and David Langford.
Accessed 01:50 am on 27 July 2024.
<https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/farley_ralph_milne>