author
Leslie Waltham
A little-known mid-century science fiction writer, active in the early 1950s, left behind a small body of imaginative work that still feels curious and offbeat today. Best known for stories like Sibling and The 13th Juror, this author wrote the kind of speculative fiction that pulp magazines loved: brisk, strange, and idea-driven.
1 Audiobook
The 13th juror
by Leslie Waltham
About the author
Leslie Waltham is an elusive figure in science fiction history. The clearest biographical detail readily available is that Waltham was active in the early 1950s, with LibriVox listing the author as flourishing around 1955.
What survives most clearly is the work itself. Waltham contributed science fiction to magazine culture of the period, including Sibling, which appeared in Thrilling Wonder Stories in August 1953, and The 13th Juror, later preserved through Project Gutenberg. Those stories suggest a writer drawn to sharp speculative premises and the tense, fast-moving style of classic pulp-era SF.
Because so little reliable personal information appears to be publicly documented, Waltham remains better known through these surviving stories than through any recorded life story. That relative mystery is part of the appeal: the name belongs to a corner of vintage science fiction where the magazines endured, even when the authors themselves almost vanished from view.