Richard Maples

Richard Maples appears to have been a mid-20th-century science fiction writer whose published work is now fairly hard to trace. Reliable catalog and library sources consistently point to just two known stories: The Frightful Ones and The Scapegoat.

Those stories were published in the 1950s, with The Frightful Ones appearing in Imagination in November 1954 and The Scapegoat dated 1956 in bibliographic records. The Scapegoat was also adapted for the radio series X Minus One, a good sign that his work fit the sharp, idea-driven style of classic science fiction from that era.

Very little biographical information about Maples seems to be publicly documented, so most of what survives is through story records and later digital editions. That makes him one of those intriguing pulp-era authors whose fiction has outlasted the details of his life.