GIESY, J(ohn) U(lrich)

(1877-1948)

   US physiotherapist and PULP-MAGAZINE writer, author of many stories, most not sf, in Argosy and All-Story Weekly 1914-34. All for His Country (1914 Cavalier; 1915), which combines plot-material from thefuture- WAR genre and from the EDISONADE, pits a young inventor's radium-powered gravity-defying plane against the treacherous Japanese; ominously, JUG also accuses Japanese-Americans from California of betrayal. The Jason Croft or Palos trilogy - Palos of the Dog Star Pack (1918 All-Story Weekly; cut 1965), The Mouthpiece of Zitu (1919 All-StoryWeekly; cut 1965) and Jason, Son of Jason (1921 Argosy; cut 1966) - features Croft's adventures on Palos, a planet of Sirius. Derivative of Edgar Rice BURROUGHS's Martian stories, these novels are also highlypractical, for Croft triumphs not through his own strength but because of an encyclopedic knowledge of Earth's technologies of destruction. JUG's further sf includes a UTOPIA, "In 2112" (1912 Cavalier), written with his frequent collaborator, the Utah lawyer Junius Smith (1883-1945), and a number of humorous stories about the eccentric Dr Xenophon Xerxes Zapt. JUG's sf - tempered as it is by a devout belief in astrology - has datedand is now of merely historical interest, but for years he was considered second only to Burroughs as an author of interplanetary romances.

   RB/JC