Eric Temple Bell - Fiction and Poetry

Fiction and Poetry

In the early 1920s, Bell wrote several long poems. He also wrote several science fiction novels, which independently invented some of the earliest devices and ideas of science fiction. Only The Purple Sapphire was published at the time, under the pseudonym John Taine; this was before Hugo Gernsback and the genre publication of science fiction. His novels were published later, both in book form and serialized in the magazines. Basil Davenport, writing in The New York Times, described "Taine" as "one of the first real scientists to write science-fiction did much to bring it out of the interplanetary cops-and-robbers stage." Davenport concluded, however, that " is sadly lacking as a novelist, in style and especially in characterization."