Letters on this page
Posted 12 February:
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Send a letter to Locus
Dear Locus,
I want to contact whoever represents the estate of Fletcher Pratt, as I wish
to reprint one of his books. Any leads gratefully received. Please note the
agent is not Eleanor Wood -- she handles the De Camp/Pratt collaborations as
de Camp's agent, but not Pratt's solo work.
Thanks.
Malcolm Edwards
9 Feb 2001
Dear Locus,
Continuing the "youngest sf writer" thread may count as beating a
dead horse (or in this case a dead colt), but I can't let Brian
Aldiss' letter in the November Locus pass unchallenged. Aldiss
notes that a story written when he was twelve was published some
sixty years later; while this is interesting, to allow such a
claim is to open the floodgates.
There are a lot of professional authors, both sf/f writers
and mainstream writers with some science fiction and/or fantasy
credits, who have had juvenalia published many years after becoming
successful as adults. One obvious example is H. P. Lovecraft,
whose earliest surviving stories which were written when he was at
most eight years old (see page 33 of Joshi's biography of HPL)
have been professionally published in the 1959 Arkham House
hardback The Shuttered Room and Other Pieces. Compared to the
Old Gentleman's eight, the twelve-year old Aldiss was a mature
man of the world (though admittedly it took Lovecraft's pieces
seventy rather than BA's mere sixty years to make it into print).
Aldiss is not even the only major author in the field to have
work done at the age of twelve later published as a seperate
pamphlet, with his own early artwork included: Ramsey Campbell's
real first-written horror collection, Ghostly Tales, was
published thus as issue #50 of Crypt of Cthulhu magazine (1987)
including a reproduction to Tom Boardman's August 1958 letter
of rejection to the then-twelve-year-old Campbell.
As I noted, there are a number of mainstream writers
with eventual sf/f credits who began publishing young:
Jane B. Wilson's Children's Writings: A Bibliography of
Works in English (McFarland, 1982) lists over 700 works
published by authors under 21, including the likes of
Kipling, Lewis Carroll, Anatole France, Robert Louis
Stevenson, H.G. Wells, etc. (Wilson was not well-read in
sf proper, I'm afraid; while she does list Tom Holt, Jane
Gaskell, and a few others, she doesn't include any of the
many teenagers who sold to the early, and sometimes to the
later, sf/f magazines, many of whom have been detailed in
earlier letters on this subject -- mostly to Locus Online.)
And here's one more eleven-year old in The Magazine of Fantasy
and Science Fiction, May 1961 issue: Mildred
Posselt, with "The Flower" -- a (very, very, very, very)
short story.
As for longer work, Nathalia Crane (1913- ), who I believe is
still alive, had a 250-page novel, The Sunken Garden, out
in 1926 by the New York firm of T. Seltzer, and a 300-page
second novel, An Alien from Heaven, published in 1929 by
Coward-McCann; according to R. Reginald's Science Fiction
and Fantasy Literature checklist, both of these are fantastic
in nature (from one review seen, the second sounds a bit
like Laurel Winter's recent Growing Wings). Crane had also
had several collections of poetry professionally published
as early as 1925. Along with Jane Gaskell, she sounds to
me like a good candidate for youngest author to sell long
wordage of genre interest to professional publishers -- though
unlike Gaskell's early novels, Crane's seem to have slipped
out of the field's consciousness. Her age of writing her
first published novel does beat Gaskell by one and probably
two years; it also beats out John Brunner, Lindsay Campbell,
and other candidates already suggested for novel length work.
(Unless Patrick O'Brian really did write his first book at
11; even then he was pipped by Crane in regard to age at
publication.)
Catherine McMullen (age 10 at writing) still looks to me
like the youngest ever legitimate sf/f sale at short story
length, unless the claims of Robin Sturgeon or John
Cunnington (also 10, but published under special
circumstances) are allowed.
All of which makes me feel even older than I did when I
started this letter...
Dennis Lien
University of Minnesota Libraries
26 Jan 2001
