author
F. E. Hardart
One of the quieter early voices in science fiction, this American writer also worked as a teacher and mechanical engineer. Her published fiction career was brief, but she remains remembered for stories such as The Beast of Space and for her place among early women in the field.
1 Audiobook
The Beast of Space
by F. E. Hardart
About the author
Writing as F. E. Hardart and sometimes identified as Flossie Hardart, she was an American teacher, mechanical engineer, and science-fiction author born in 1913 and deceased in 1992. Reference works on speculative fiction describe her as a U.S. teacher and engineer who had a short writing career, while library and fan-history sources connect the byline to Florence Elizabeth "Flossie" Hardart.
Her fiction output seems to have been small, with sources consistently pointing to a brief burst of activity around the late 1930s and early 1940s. She is best known for The Beast of Space, and fan-history accounts note her involvement in early science-fiction circles, including attendance at the first World Science Fiction Convention in 1939.
What makes her especially interesting is the mix of paths she followed: engineering, teaching, and imaginative fiction at a time when women in both technical work and science fiction were far less visible. Even with only a modest body of published work, she has kept a lasting niche in the history of early genre writing.