author

William L. Bade

1928–2005

A physicist who also wrote hard science fiction, he brought real scientific thinking to a small but memorable run of magazine stories in the late 1940s and early 1950s. His work sits at the crossroads of early space-age imagination and professional science.

1 Audiobook

Ambition

Ambition

by William L. Bade

About the author

Born in Lincoln, Nebraska, on April 5, 1928, William L. Bade was an American physicist, academic, and science fiction writer. Reference works on science fiction describe him as a hard-SF author, and an obituary remembers him as a leader in biophysics and re-entry physics who contributed to the U.S. space program.

He began publishing fiction with "Advent" in Astounding in January 1948. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction notes that this launched his short "Advent" sequence, which ran through the early 1950s, and that he published only a handful of additional stories beyond it. One of those stories, "Ambition," remains available through Project Gutenberg.

Bade died in Hyannis, Massachusetts, on February 12, 2005. Though his fiction output was brief, it has lasting interest for readers who enjoy classic science fiction shaped by a working scientist's view of space, technology, and the future.