Stuart J. Byrne

Stuart James Byrne (October 26, 1913 - September 23, 2011) was an American screenwriter and writer of science fiction and fantasy. He published under his own name and the pseudonyms Rothayne Amare, John Bloodstone, Howard Dare, and Marx Kaye (a house pseudonym). Byrne was born in St. Paul, Minnesota. Later he recalled, "I was in there early enough to see magic lantern slides instead of movies, to watch the little man in the black suit climb his ladder to light our gas lamp out front, and in the early twenties I was excited by whisperings of a thing called radio!" Favorite fiction memories of the time included Grimm's Fairy Tales, Alice in Wonderland, L. Frank Baum's Oz stories, the Rover Boys, the Boy Allies, Gernsback science fiction, and "the life-changing impact of the Edgar Rice Burroughs books."At the age of twelve, he moved with his family to California. In his teen years, his interest in science fiction continued. He also became an avid amateur astronomer. Years later, he recalled that "many a summer night ... were spent in awe ... in the Pleiades and the great Orion Nebula, or surfing the moons of Jupiter and rings of Saturn. In fact at fifteen I was grinding parabolic mirrors for my amateur telescope."In the 1930s, he married Joey and fathered two children, Richard and Joanne; he now has three grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. He earned an M.A. at UCLA. He published his first science fiction story, entitled "Music of the Spheres" in Amazing Stories in 1935. It told how a young man sacrificed his life to send a passenger spaceship away from a fatal encounter with the sun. In their capsule review of the book, Bleiler and Bleiler state, "The story, which is purple in writing, now considers the sensations of the young man as he approaches death in the sun, fancying that he hears the music of the spheres."In the 1940s and 1950s, Byrne published in Science Stories, Amazing Stories, Imagination, and Other Worlds.

Byrne's character, Michael Flanagan, appeared as the hero of three novels published in Amazing Stories: The Land Beyond the Lens, The Golden Gods, and The Return of Michael Flannigan, all listed as by John Bloodstone. The first two of these stories were collected as Godman (spelled "Godman!" on the cover) in 1970. All have been reprinted by Armchair Fiction as by S.J. Byrne. According to Byrne's later reminiscence, the name "John Bloodstone" was suggested by Ray Palmer to fool Howard Browne, the editor of Amazing Stories, who had requested that Palmer write a story about a picture showing a man going through some kind of lens. Palmer passed the job over to Byrne, but eventually confessed the switch to Browne.