John Taine 1883—1960

Eric Temple Bell (writing under the pseudonym, John Taine) was a Scottish-born mathematician and science fiction writer who lived in the United States for most of his life. During the early 1920s, Bell wrote several long poems, and several science fiction novels, which independently invented some of the earliest devices and ideas of science fiction. Only the novel The Purple Sapphire was published at the time, using the pseudonym John Taine; this was before Hugo Gernsback and the genre publication of science fiction. His novels were published later, both in book form and serialized in magazines. Basil Davenport, writing in The New York Times, described Taine as “one of the first real scientists to write science-fiction [who] did much to bring it out of the interplanetary cops-and-robbers stage.“