EISENBERG, Larry

(1919-)

   US writer and for many years Co-Director of the Electronics Laboratory at Rockefeller University. He began publishing sf with "The Mynah Matter" as Lawrence Eisenberg for Fantastic Stories in 1962, and became known for his comic sequence of stories about Emmett Duckworth; many of these were assembled in his only collection, The Best Laid Schemes (coll 1971). As an inventor whose devices crucially misfire, Duckworth might seem a cheap target, but LE presents his recurring disasters with winning sympathy. The stories describing the relationship of humans to the ALIEN Sentients were very much darker in import, though never unrelentingly so. After the beginning of the 1980s, LE became relatively inactive.

   JC