author
Charles R. Tanner
1896–1974
Best known for the adventure-filled Tumithak stories, this early pulp-era writer helped imagine far-future underground worlds and alien-threat sagas before many of the genre’s later classics. His fiction also reached into fantasy and weird tales, giving his work a wide, old-school speculative feel.
1 Audiobook
Mutiny in the Void
by Charles R. Tanner
About the author
Born in Cincinnati in 1896, Charles R. Tanner was an American science fiction and fantasy writer whose work appeared mainly in the pulp magazines of the 1930s and early 1940s. His first published short story was "The Color of Space" in Science Wonder Stories in 1930, and he is most often remembered for the Tumithak sequence.
The Tumithak stories follow a future Earth where humans survive in underground corridors after conquest by alien invaders from Venus. That series gave Tanner his lasting place in genre history, and reference works on science fiction continue to single it out as his best-known achievement.
Tanner also wrote fantasy and weird fiction, including work connected with the Cthulhu Mythos, and remained a remembered figure among early science fiction fans as well as readers. He died in 1974, but his stories still attract interest from readers curious about the imaginative, fast-moving world of early magazine science fiction.