Ray Cummings

Ray Cummings (1887–1957), born Raymond King Cummings, was an American science-fiction writer whose career began in the heyday of the pulp magazines. Before writing full-time, he worked as an assistant to Thomas Edison from 1914 to 1919, handling Edison Records materials and related writing tasks.

His first professional science-fiction story, “The Girl in the Golden Atom,” appeared in 1919 and became the basis for his best-known novel, published in 1922. Cummings went on to produce hundreds of stories and novels featuring time travel, miniaturization, space adventure, alien worlds, and future societies. During the 1940s, he also anonymously wrote comic-book stories for Timely Comics, the company that preceded Marvel Comics.