P. Schuyler Miller

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Peter Schuyler Miller (born February 21, 1912 in Troy , New York ; died October 13, 1974 on Blennerhassett Island , West Virginia ) was an American science fiction writer and critic.

Life

Miller's parents were the chemist Philip Schuyler Miller and the teacher Edith May, née Figgis. He grew up in the Mohawk Valley in New York State, which established his lifelong interest in the Iroquois culture and archaeological legacy . In later years he was a dedicated amateur archaeologist, contributing to the anthropological division of the Carnegie Museum , the Eastern States Archeological Society , the Van Epps-Hartley Chapter of the New York Archeological Association , the Society for American Archeology, and the Society for Pennsylvania Archeology , for their journal Pennsylvania Archaeologist he was interim editor. When Miller died in 1974, aged only 62, he was on a field trip to a Fort Ancient culture archaeological site west of Parkersburg , West Virginia.

Miller was a good student, gave the graduation speech of his year at the age of 15 and then studied chemistry at Union College in Schenectady , where he graduated with a Masters in 1932 . He then worked as a laboratory assistant at the General Electric Research Institute in Schenectady until 1934 . From 1937 to 1952 he worked in adult education and public relations at the Schenectady Museum and eventually became its director. From 1952 to 1974 he was a technical writer for the Fisher Scientific Company in Pittsburgh , Pennsylvania .

From his youth, Miller was an avid reader of science fiction, starting with the stories of Jules Verne . In August 1924 he bought his first SF magazine, an issue of Hugo Gernsback's Science and Invention , and was henceforth a loyal reader of pulp magazines such as Argosy and Weird Tales, and later of Astounding . He began contributing to the early fanzines , became a member of the Fantasy Amateur Press Association (FAPA), corresponded with Robert E. Howard , the creator of Conan the Cimmerian , for whom he and his friend John D. Clark wrote a “résumé " Which appeared in Howard's The Hyborean Age in 1938 .

However, he was not satisfied with reading science fiction and being an active member of the SF fandom of the 1930s, but began writing SF stories himself. In 1930 he won the Air Wonder competition advertised by Gernsback, which was endowed with 150 dollars in gold - a tremendous sum for Miller, then 18, and not just for him, which is why there were over 500 entries. The story, The Red Plague , was of course also printed in Wonder Stories and Gernsback said it was one of the best stories that has appeared in his magazines so far. Over the next 20 years Miller published around 50 stories and a novel, Genus Homo (1950, German as Die neue Herrherr ), which he wrote together with Lyon Sprague de Camp , in which the apes have evolved in a distant future and now the Rulers of the world, an idea that was later taken up in Pierre Boulle's Planet of the Apes .

When science fiction began to appear less in pulp magazines and more as paperback and eventually as a hardback book from the 1950s onwards, Miller remained an avid reader and buyer. However, he no longer had to buy a lot, but received review copies, because from 1945 he had started to write SF reviews for Astounding , which from 1951 appeared regularly under the title The Reference Library . By the end of his life he wrote hundreds of book reviews, practically every SF title worth reading during this time was competently discussed by him, although he usually did not make too great claims, but he was still considered reliable. When his sister left a large part of Miller's library to the Carnegie Museum after his death , a catalog was created and published which contained 3,500 volumes excluding the paperbacks, which was another 4,600 volumes.

Miller was honored with the Special Convention Award as best critic at the Worldcon 1963 in Baltimore . In 1975 he was posthumously awarded the Locus Award for his work as an SF critic . He is credited with coining the term Hard-SF for scientifically and technically oriented science fiction.

bibliography

Novels
  • Alicia in Blunderland (1933, 1983, as Nihil)
  • Cosmos: Chapter 14: The Fate of the Neptunians (1934, part of a collaborative project with numerous authors)
  • Genus Homo (1950, with L. Sprague de Camp )
    • German: The new rulers. Translated by Klaus Mahn . Moewig (Terra special volume # 40), 1961. Also as: The new rulers. Translated by Horst Hoffmann . Pabel (Utopia Classics # 13), 1980.
collection
  • The Titan (1952)
Short stories
  • The Red Plague (1930)
  • Dust of Destruction (1931)
  • Through the Vibrations (1931)
  • The Man from Mars (1931)
  • Cleon of Yzdral (1931)
  • The Red Spot of Jupiter (1931, with Paul McDermott and Walter Dennis, as Dennis McDermott)
  • The Arrhenius Horror (1931)
  • Tetrahedra of Space (1931)
  • The Duel on the Asteroid (1932, with Paul McDermott and Walter Dennis, as P. Schuyler Miller and Dennis McDermott)
  • Red Flame of Venus (1932)
  • The Forgotten Man of Space (1933, also called Forgotten , 1933)
  • Jeremiah Jones, Alchemist (1933)
  • Ultra Violet (1933)
  • Black Lem Gulliver (1933)
  • The Atom Smasher (1934)
  • The Wreck in Space (1934)
  • Cigarette Characterization # 1 (1934)
  • The Pool of Life (1934)
  • The White Gulls Cry (1935)
  • The People of the Arrow (1935)
  • The Titan (1935)
  • The Chrysalis (1936)
  • The Sands of Time (1937)
    • German: traces in the sands of time. In: Robert Silverberg (ed.): The murderers of Mohammeds. Marion von Schröder (Science Fiction & Fantastica), 1970.
  • Coils of Time (1939)
  • Pleasure Trove (1939)
  • Spawn (1939)
    • English: The Brood of Hell. In: Michel Parry (ed.): King Kong's rivals. Pabel (Vampire Paperback # 76), 1979.
  • In the Good Old Summertime (1940)
  • Living Isotopes (1940)
  • The Flayed Wolf (1940)
  • Old Man Mulligan (1940)
  • The Ultimate Image (1940)
  • Trouble on Tantalus (1941)
  • Bird Walk (1941)
  • Over the River (1941)
    • German: The cursed one. Translated by Gretl Friedmann. In: Larry T. Shaw (Ed.): Terror. Heyne (Heyne General Series # 960), 1972. Also as: Across the river. Translated by Jürgen Abel . In: Peter Haining (Ed.): Hour of the Vampires. Fischer Taschenbuch (Fischer Taschenbücher # 1527), 1974, ISBN 3-436-02002-8 .
  • Smugglers of the Moon (1941)
  • The Facts of Life (1941)
  • The Frog (1942)
  • A Matter of Eclipses (1942)
  • The Cave (1943)
  • John Cawder's Wife (1943)
  • The Hounds of Kalimar (1943)
  • Gleeps (1943)
  • Fricassee in Four Dimensions (1943)
  • As Never Was (1944)
  • Cuckoo (1944)
  • Plane and Fancy (1944)
  • Ship-in-a-Bottle (1945)
  • Ghost (1946)
  • The Thing on Outer Shoal (1947)
  • Daydream (1949)
  • Status Quondam (1951)
  • For Analysis (1958)

literature

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Miller, P. Schuyler
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Miller, Peter Schuyler (full name); Nihil (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American science fiction writer and critic
DATE OF BIRTH February 21, 1912
PLACE OF BIRTH Troy , New York
DATE OF DEATH October 13, 1974
Place of death Blennerhassett Island , West Virginia