Harry Bates

(October 9, 1900 - September 1981)

Harry Bates was born Hiram Gilmore Bates in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He began working for William Clayton in the 1920s as the editor of adventure pulp magazines. When Clayton proposed a period adventure magazine, Bates suggested several alternatives that he said would be easier to edit, and Astounding Stories of Super Science (later Astounding Science Fiction) was the result. Bates, who was not a fan of SF, edited the magazine from its inception in January, 1930, until March, 1933, when Clayton went bankrupt and the magazine was sold to Street and Smith Publishers.

During that time, he edited other magazines for Clayton, including Strange Tales, intended to compete with Weird Tales.

In 1964, Bates recalled his editorship of Astounding: "Long ago I was a party to the genesis of a magazine which persisted through thirty years and thirty millions of words. Astounding was a living being. I served it in its infancy and childhood, Orlin Tremaine brought it through youth and adolescence, John W. Campbell, Jr. guided it through adulthood and maturity."

His 1940 SF story, "Farewell to the Master," was the basis of the 1951 science fiction movie The Day the Earth Stood Still. (Remember "Klaatu borada nikto"?)

Under the pseudonym of Anthony Gilmore, Harry Bates wrote the stories in the "Hawk Carse" series with Desmond W. Hall, collected in Space Hawk: The Greatest of Interplanetary Adventurers (NY: Greenberg, 1952). The two writers also shared the penname H. G. Winter.

Awards, Honors and GoHships:

• 1976 -- First Fandom's Hall of Fame

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Person

1900—1981

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