author
Edward Peattie
A civil engineer by profession, he slipped into science fiction only briefly, leaving behind a pair of mid-1950s stories that still catch readers with their mix of big ideas and human tension.
1 Audiobook
The Laboratorians
by Edward Peattie
About the author
Edward Peattie, also listed as Edward Cahill Peattie, was an American civil engineer who wrote a small but memorable body of science fiction. Library and public-domain records credit him with two stories from the 1950s, including The Laboratorians and The Green Desert.
He came from a notably literary family. Sources on his mother, the journalist and novelist Elia Wilkinson Peattie, identify Edward Cahill Peattie as one of her children, making him the older brother of naturalist and author Donald Culross Peattie.
Because so little biographical material survives in widely available sources, his fiction tends to speak for him. That scarcity gives his work a certain mystery: he appears as a practical professional who stepped into speculative fiction just long enough to leave a distinctive trace.