I was thrilled to the back teeth when I found Eric Frank Russell last night, I’d never heard of him before but one of my favourite magazines was mentioned on his Wikipedia entry as Further Reading! They’re talking about an article by Jacob Edwards titled Overlooked: The Non-fiction of Eric Frank Russell. It’s a neat, little article talking about how Russell doesn’t give his viewpoint about anything in his science fiction but lets fly in his non-fiction books about such issues as mass hysteria, fear mongering and the like. They follow this up with a reprint of an article Russell wrote called Who’s That Knocking? talking about communication between different types of animals and would we actually recognise aliens talking to us if it happened?

Russell has been published in many pulp fiction magazines sometimes using different names so tracking all of his works down may be challenging.

He won the first annual Hugo Award for Best Short Story in 1955 and has received two hall of fame awards since his death in 1978. John L. Ingham wrote a thorough and detailed biography of Russell in 2010 but I’m struggling to find a copy to link to for you.

His book A Present From Joe is also listed in a Further Reading list with such luminaries as Arthur C. Clarke, H. G. Wells and John Wyndham in Aspects of Science Fiction edited by G. D. Doherty. This is where I first saw his name and I felt he must be worthwhile as his is the only name in this list I’d never heard of, the theory is that he must be worth reading.