author
Sue Greenleaf
An early American novelist whose work blended speculative ideas with occult themes, she is best remembered for a strange and ambitious turn-of-the-century story about harnessing energy from sunlight.
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About the author
Sue Greenleaf was an American novelist active in the early 1900s. Reliable sources agree that she wrote Liquid from the Sun's Rays (1901), a novel often noted for mixing early science-fiction ideas with occultism, and she is also associated with Don Miguel Lehumada, Discoverer of Liquid from the Sun's Rays.
Reference works on speculative fiction describe her as a feminist writer, and they connect her with places including Fort Worth, Texas, Saltillo, Mexico, and later San Francisco. Very little firmly documented biographical information appears to have survived, so most modern interest in her centers on the unusual imagination and genre-blending quality of her fiction.
Today, Greenleaf is mainly remembered by readers of early science fiction, utopian fiction, and overlooked women writers. Her work offers a glimpse of a moment when spiritualism, invention, and social ideas could all meet inside the same novel.