author
1913–1988
A mid-20th-century science fiction writer best remembered for the short story "It's a Small Solar System," he also contributed to the wider world of fantasy and fandom through work connected with Conan scholarship.
Allan Howard (December 1, 1913 – May 6, 1988) was a science fiction author. Public-domain and catalog records linked to his work identify him with the short story It's a Small Solar System, first published in Fantastic Universe in September 1957 and later preserved by Project Gutenberg and LibriVox.
He also appears in connection with The Blade of Conan (1979), a collection of essays on Robert E. Howard's famous hero. That places him not only among magazine-era science fiction writers, but also among the readers, critics, and enthusiasts who helped keep classic adventure and fantasy traditions alive.
Reliable biographical detail beyond those publication records is scarce, so the surviving picture is necessarily a modest one: a writer of the pulp-and-paperback era whose name remains in circulation through a handful of enduring genre references.