Meet Ray Palmer. A hustler, a trickster and a visionary. The hunchbacked Palmer, who stood at just over four feet tall, was nevertheless an indomitable force, the ruler of his own bizarre sector of the universe. Armed with only his typewriter, Palmer changed the world as we know it - jumpstarting the flying saucer craze; frightening hundreds of thousands of Americans with true stories of evil denizens of inner earth and reporting on cover-ups involving extraterrestrials, the paranormal and secret government agencies. As editor for the ground-breaking sci-fi magazine, Amazing Stories, and creator of publications such as Other Worlds, Imagination, Fate, Mystic, Search, Flying Saucers, Hidden World and Space Age, Palmer pushed the limits and broke new ground in science fiction publishing in the 1940s and 1950s - and was reviled for it by purists who called him the man who killed science fiction.
In the first-ever biography devoted to the figure who moulded modern geek culture, pulp scholar, Fred Nadis, paints a vivid portrait of Palmer - a brilliant, charming and wildly wilful iconoclast who helped ignite the UFO craze, convinced Americans of hidden worlds and government cover ups and championed the occult and paranormal. Palmer overcame serious physical handicaps to become the most significant editor during the golden age of pulp magazines; he rebelled in his own inimitable way against the bland suburban vision of the American Dream; he concocted new literary genres and he moulded our current conspiracy culture decades before The X-Files claimed that the truth was out there. Palmer could not have asked for a more sympathetic chronicler, or a better one, than Fred Nadis. His prose and his pronouncements are everything Palmer’s practically never were: restrained, nuanced, intelligently considered. Nadis has a great story, and he relates it exquisitely. -Jerome Clark, Fortean Times Fred Nadis’s insightful biography demonstrates that Palmer is significant as well as intriguing.
-The Washington Post One of science fiction’s greatest gadflies gets his due in this lively and entertaining biography. -Publishers Weekly Lucidly written and unfailingly lively, The Man from Mars is a biography worthy of its subject. -Fate magazine