Raymond Z. Gallun

Raymond Z. Gallun (1911-1994) was an American writer among the earliest generation of science fiction pulp authors, publishing his first stories at sixteen in 1929. Through the 1930s he became a prolific contributor to the pulp magazines that defined the genre's Golden Age, known for stories emphasizing alien points of view and the loneliness of contact between species. His best-known story, "Old Faithful" (1934), depicts a sympathetic Martian scientist attempting to communicate with Earth. He later published novels including The Planet Strappers (1961), following a group of young amateurs building their own path into space, and People Minus X (1957). Gallun received the I-CON Lifetime Achievement Award in 1985, subsequently renamed the Raymond Z. Gallun Award in his honor, and a mural in his hometown of Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, was dedicated to his memory in 2017.