Jr. L. J. Stecher

Joseph Wesley, who also wrote as L. J. Stecher and L. J. Stecher Jr., was an American science fiction writer. Sources consistently connect those names, and bibliographic records list him as active mainly in short fiction and essays.

His stories appeared during the classic magazine period of science fiction, with works such as Man in a Sewing Machine (1956), Man in a Quandary (1958), Perfect Answer (1958), Upstarts (1960), An Elephant for the Prinkip (1960), A Matter of Taste (1961), and Cakewalk to Gloryanna (1963). Project Gutenberg currently gathers several of these stories under the Stecher name, which has helped keep his work easy to rediscover.

The dates attached to his records vary slightly by source: some catalogs identify him as 1918–1988, while a grave record gives October 18, 1919 to March 19, 1988. With the basic outline clear but some biographical details uncertain, the safest picture is of a mid-20th-century American SF author remembered for brisk, idea-driven stories rather than a large body of novels.