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Henry Kuttner & C. L. Moore
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 In the late 1940s at the height of the Golden Age, the fans attending a world science fiction
convention voted for Henry Kuttner over Asimov, Heinlein, Sturgeon, Van Vogt, and all the others as the world's
best science fiction writer. By that time it was an open secret that Kuttner (and his pseudonyms, Lewis Padgett
and Laurence O'Donnell) was three of the most popular living sf writers. And he was married to
C. L. Moore, another of the finest sf writers of the day. Their collaborative works (all their stories under whatever
byline were jointly created -- the Padgett name was used for stories that were more strongly Kuttner's) set the
highest standard of literary quality in science fiction of the 1940s. To other writers, he was the craftsman par
excellence. Several volumes of Kuttner/Moore short fiction appeared in hardcover in the late 1940s and
early 1950s, including A Gnome There Was (1950),
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and The Fairy
Chessmen (1951), Robots Have No Tails (1952),
Mutant (1953), No Boundaries (1955), as well as the novel
Fury (1950). But they turned to mystery and detective novels at that time and returned to graduate school to pursue an
education interrupted by the Great Depression and wrote little sf or fantasy in the 1950s before Kuttner's sudden death
at 42 in 1958, months before he was to be guest of honor at that year's World SF convention. Moore
stopped writing science fiction after Kuttner's death.
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The Ascent of Wonder copyright © 1994 by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. | ||
Cramer: On Science & Science Fiction || Hartwell: Hard Science Fiction
David G. Hartwell || Kathryn Cramer || About Tor Books || Ordering Info
Interactive Intoduction to THE ASCENT OF WONDER copyright © 1995-1997 by Kathryn Cramer.