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Roman Frederick Starzl
1899–1976
An early American pulp writer, he helped shape the feel of space adventure stories while also working as a journalist and newspaper publisher in Iowa. Though little known today, his fiction was admired by some of science fiction’s first major voices.
3 Audiobooks
In the Orbit of Saturn
by Roman Frederick Starzl
The Metal Moon
by Roman Frederick Starzl, Everett C. Smith
The Martian Cabal
by Roman Frederick Starzl
About the author
Roman Frederick Starzl was an American writer born in Le Mars, Iowa, in 1899. Reliable reference sources describe him as both a journalist and a fiction writer, and note that he was involved with the Le Mars Globe-Post, the family newspaper that he and, before him, his father owned.
He is best remembered for science-fiction stories published in pulp magazines between the late 1920s and early 1930s. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction says he published 24 stories from 1928 to 1934, largely to help finance the family paper, and later stepped away from fiction. His work has often been linked with the early development of space-opera storytelling.
Starzl died in 1976. While his name is not as widely recognized as some of his contemporaries, he remains part of the foundation of early magazine science fiction, especially for readers interested in the genre’s adventurous, fast-moving beginnings.