BIBLIOFILE

Volsted Gridban?! Who was he? In fact the answer is far too easy to Google up, although frankly it may leave you none the wiser (authorial multi-personality disorder comes to mind). Volsted? Sounds suspiciously Aryan. Gridban? A 21st century control order denying thought criminals access to the world wide web? The prisoner made no comment after being sentenced to 'a total gridban to be served in an information gulag'. Ahem, well the subject under discussion here is fantasy fiction, and in industrial quantities.

No, Volsted Gridban must qualify as the most transparently obvious, laughable example of a pseudonym in the entire history of writing. Well almost, if you weren't aware that John Russell Fearn (1908-60) had a string of between thirty and forty other pulp aliases, even taking into account a few on that list which were namesharing devices with other writers: Morton Boyce, Sheridan Drew, Nat Karta, Dom Passante, Earl Titan, Jed McNab, Ephraim Winiki, etc., and that VG was actually already secondhand and shopsoiled by the time Lancashire born Fearn acquired it from E.C.Tubb, a fellow writer, who departed from new SF publishers Scion in 1952. Scion however were unwilling to let a good thing go, and so Fearn appropriated Tubb's suggestive nom-de-plume.

Fearn started out writing so called 'thought variant' stories in the 1930s after discovering Amazing Stories in Woolworths. His outlandish SF tales appeared in magazines on both sides of the Atlantic, although it was in the USA that he first learnt his trade and developed a cranky, populist brand of pseudoscientific fiction. Cowboy dime novels and detective stories also made him a living after the war, though Fearn's heyday was during the 1950s pocketbook boom in BritSci-Fi, when his prolific output (over 200 novels) saw him speculating on themes such as alien metamorphosis, resurrection and time travel. Apparently the splendidly named The Liners of Time was an influence on James Blish, and the title of a 1968 NEL anthology of Fearn tales, Deserted Universe has a decidedly Ballardesque ring to it.

(To be continued...)