Biography
Russell was born in 1905 near Sandhurst in Berkshire, where his father was an instructor at the Royal Military Academy. Russell became a fan of science fiction, and in 1934 while living near Liverpool he saw a letter in Amazing Stories written by Leslie J. Johnson, another reader from the same area. Russell met up with Johnson, who encouraged him to embark on a writing career. Together, the two men wrote the novella "Seeker of Tomorrow" which was published in Astounding in July 1937. Both Russell and Johnson became members of the British Interplanetary Society.
Russell's first novel was Sinister Barrier, published in the first issue of Astounding's short-lived sister magazine Unknown (March 1939). This is an explicitly Fortean tale based (as Russell explains in the novel's foreword) on Charles Fort's famous speculation "I think we're property". An often-repeated legend has it that Campbell, on receiving the manuscript for Sinister Barrier, created Unknown primarily as a vehicle for the short novel. There is no real evidence for this, in spite of a statement to that effect in the first volume of Isaac Asimov's autobiography, In Memory Yet Green.
His second novel, Dreadful Sanctuary (serialized in Astounding during 1948) is an early example of conspiracy fiction, in which a paranoid delusion of global proportions is perpetuated by a small but powerful secret society.
There are two different and mutually incompatible accounts of Russell's military service during World War II. The official, well-documented version is that he served with the Royal Air Force, with whom he saw active service in Europe as a member of a Mobile Signals Unit. However, in the introduction to the 1986 Del Rey Books edition of Russell's novel Wasp, Jack L. Chalker states that Russell was too old for active service, and instead worked for Military Intelligence in London, where he "spent the war dreaming up nasty tricks to play against the Germans and Japanese", including Operation Mincemeat. Russell's biographer John L. Ingham states however that "there is nothing, absolutely nothing, in his R.A.F. Record to show that he was anything more than a wireless mechanic and radio operator".
Russell took up writing full-time in the late 1940s. He became an active member of British science fiction fandom and the British representative of the Fortean Society. He won the first Hugo Award for Best Short Story in 1955 for his humorous short story "Allamagoosa".
Russell was awarded a posthumous Prometheus Hall of Fame award in 1985 for his novel The Great Explosion, and in 2000 he was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.
Into Your Tent, a thorough and detailed biography of Russell by John L. Ingham, was published in 2010 by Plantech (UK).
Read more about this topic: Eric Frank Russell
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