Laurence M. Janifer

Born in Brooklyn on March 17, 1933, Laurence M. Janifer was an American science fiction author whose career stretched from the early 1950s into the early 2000s. He was born Laurence Mark Harris and later took the surname Janifer, a family name from his grandfather's side.

Janifer wrote an enormous amount of fiction under his own name and several pseudonyms, moving easily between science fiction, fantasy, mystery, and tie-in work. Reference sources also note his collaborations with Randall Garrett, especially the comic psi-powered adventures published under the shared pen name Mark Phillips, which helped make him well known to genre readers.

Beyond his fiction, Janifer was active in the wider science fiction field as an editor, anthologist, reviewer, and essayist. That range gives his work an appealing breadth: even when the ideas are strange or satirical, his stories tend to feel lively, readable, and deeply at home in classic mid-century speculative fiction.