TAINE, John

   Pseudonym for all his fiction of Eric Temple Bell (1883-1960), US mathematician and writer, born in Scotland; he also wrote academic and popular works on mathematics under his own name. JT's first novel was a LOST-WORLD fantasy, The Purple Sapphire (1924), and he published severalfurther sf books before writing for the sf PULP MAGAZINES. The Gold Tooth (1927) concerns a quest for a magical element. Quayle's Invention (1927)features a device for making gold. Green Fire (1928) is one of many contemporary stories about super- WEAPONS. His best and most interesting work includes a long sequence of mutational romances (MUTANTS) involving rapid and uncontrolled EVOLUTION: The Greatest Adventure (1929); The Iron Star (1930); The Crystal Horde (1930 AMZ Quarterly as "White Lily"; 1952),featuring crystalline life, and Seeds of Life (1931 AMZ Quarterly; 1951), an important early SUPERMAN story, both much later assembled as Seeds of Life and White Lily (omni 1966); "The Ultimate Catalyst" (1939); and TheForbidden Garden (1947). Before the Dawn (1934) is a didactic prehistoric romance in which the end of the dinosaurs is observed through a time-viewer. The Time Stream (1931 Wonder Stories; 1946) is an elaborate TIME-TRAVEL adventure which, like the mutational romances, helped toextend the horizons of pulp sf and is one of the outstanding products of the early SF MAGAZINES; it was much later assembled with The Greatest Adventure and The Purple Sapphire, all texts slightly edited, as ThreeScience Fiction Novels (omni 1964). The title story of The Cosmic Geoids and One Other (coll 1949) is an interesting but not altogether successful literary experiment, taking the form of a series of imaginary scientific reports dealing with strange extraterrestrial objects; the "one other" is the novella "Black Goldfish". Two inferior novels were the superweapon story "Twelve Eighty-Seven" (1935 ASF) and the DISASTER story "Tomorrow" (1939 Marvel Science Stories). JT's last book was the sympathetic- MONSTERstory G.O.G. 666 (1954).JT's prose style is sometimes crude, and his characterization usually lacks finesse, but his best work shows an admirable imaginative flair. He loved to do things on a grand scale, and many of his novels end with catastrophes which overwhelm whole continents.

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   Constance Reid, The Search for E T Bell, Also Known as John Taine(1993).

   See also: BIOLOGY; DEVOLUTION; FANTASTIC VOYAGES; HISTORY OF SF; INTELLIGENCE; METAPHYSICS; MONEY; PSEUDO-SCIENCE.