In keeping with one of my overall guiding principles for this site – promoting work that is not otherwise actively marketed by publishers – I will focus on public domain titles and authors over the next few weeks.
Let’s start with Roger Sherman Hoar, who was a Massachusetts state senator and asssistant Attorney General in the early 20th century. Hoar was busy – politician, advocate of women’s suffrage, and mathematics professor – and obviously, he was also a writer. Using the pseudonym Ralph Milne Farley (which I feel like he chose from the names of three pet dogs, but I don’t know), Hoar created the Radio Man series among other works, publishing mainly in sci-fi pulp magazines. I read the first few pages of Radio Man. It’s quite readable and subtly humorous, told in first person from the point of view of Myles Cabot, a Boston amateur radio enthusiast. You will also meet some Venusians and some giant ants in what promises to be an entertaining read for fans of classic / pulp science fiction. Radio Man, also published as An Earth Man on Venus, was first published in 1924. The image in the book looks like it’s from the 1950 Avon Books release.
This book is brought to you via Project Gutenberg. I encourage you to explore this site; it’s also where I pull my Monday Morning Whitman material (although I do own the hardcopy of his Leaves of Grass), and you can read most of the pubications on this site online or in several different ebook formats including a Kindle version. All of their books are free.