Harry Bates

Bio: Harry Bates (1900-1981) probably had no idea he was penning a story that would become a legend and spawn one of the most celebrated science fiction movies of all time when in 1940 he wrote "Farewell to the Master," which would be filmed a decade later as The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). Bates was probably just attempting to write a well-told, thought-provoking story that would captivate science fiction readers and bring him a check from his editor by return mail. That he succeeded beyond his wildest dreams is no surprise, for Bates already had a series of now classic science fiction tales to his credit. As the creator and first editor of Astounding, the second science fiction magazine to emerge from the pulps (and today renamed Analog), he had, with collaborator and assistant editor Desmond W. Hall, written the infamous Hawk Carse stories, which helped redefine sf from the stodgy, almost academic presentation it had developed in Hugo Gernsback's pioneering Amazing Stories into a fast-moving, vividly colorful art form that piled wonder on wonder and adventurous incident on adventurous incident. Bates, who had begun Astounding in 1930, left it when the magazine was sold in 1933 to freelance, and his writing had grown up with the field, under the tenure of Astounding's next two editors, F. Orlin Tremaine and then John W. Campbell, a man of such vision that during the first three years of his assuming control of the magazine he discovered almost every major writer who dominated the field over the next three decades (Heinlein, Asimov, de Camp, etc.) and completely changed the direction of science fiction toward a mature, philosophic fiction based on reasoning and scientific principles. Under first Tremaine's and then Campbell's influence, Bates had made a quantum jump, producing a trio of sophisticated plays-on-ideas that stood traditional science fiction ideas on their head and were greeted by the kind of reader acclaim that marks the emergence of stories destined to be ranked among the classics of any field. The first of these was "A Matter of Size" (1934), the second, "Alas, All Thinking" (1935), and then after a hiatus of five years during which Bates was occupied with editorial work, he produced his magnum opus, "Farewell to the Master" (1940) AKA "The Day the Earth Stood Still" ? for which he would posthumously receive the coveted Balrog Award (1983). All three stories appear in this collection. Later, Bates would pen several equally adroit science fictional tales, including "The Experiment of Dr. Sarconi" (1940), "A Matter of Speed" (1941), "The Triggered Dimension" (1953), and "Death of a Sensitive" (1954). However, it is for "Farewell to the Master" and its haunting last line, and the poignant, equally-haunting film based on the story, that long-time science fiction fans remember Harry Bates.