author
1913–1988
A mid-century science fiction writer with a clear, compact style, he is best remembered for stories that look at space travel through a very human lens. His work also connects to the lively fan culture that helped shape American science fiction in the postwar years.
Born on December 1, 1913, and died on May 6, 1988, Allan Howard is identified by LibriVox as a science fiction author. Public-domain editions of It's a Small Solar System have helped keep his name in circulation, and the story is still one of the works most closely associated with him.
That story has been described by Project Gutenberg as a mid-20th-century science fiction vignette about humanity's first crewed mission to Mars, with a reflective mood that looks back at earlier dreams of space adventure. Archive copies of the text also preserve a useful bit of context: Howard is introduced there as director of the Eastern Science Fiction Association in Newark.
Records for the Eastern Science Fiction Association at Syracuse University show Allan Howard serving as the club's secretary in meeting minutes from 1968 to 1977. Taken together, those sources suggest a writer who was part of both the creative and community side of science fiction, contributing not only stories but also time and energy to fandom.