author
J. Francis McComas
1911–1978
A key early voice in modern science fiction, this editor and critic helped shape what readers found on magazine stands and bookstore shelves. He also wrote his own fiction, sometimes under the pen name Webb Marlowe.
1 Audiobook
Criminal Negligence
by J. Francis McComas
About the author
Born in Kansas City, Missouri, Jesse Francis McComas went on to become an important American science fiction editor, reviewer, and writer. He worked in publishing beginning in the early 1940s, including time with Random House, before building a reputation as one of the field's sharpest editorial minds.
McComas is especially remembered as the co-editor, with Raymond J. Healy, of Adventures in Time and Space (1946), an influential early science fiction anthology. A few years later he became a co-founding editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction with Anthony Boucher, helping establish a magazine that would become central to the genre.
Alongside his editorial work, he published short fiction in the 1950s under his own name and as Webb Marlowe, and he also reviewed science fiction for The New York Times. He died on April 19, 1978, in Fremont, California, but his influence on mid-century science fiction publishing has lasted well beyond his lifetime.