S. P. Meek: Science Fiction Adventure Writer

Captain S. P. Meek (1894-1972), if you were to look him up on Google, would most likely come up as the author of Jerry, the Adventures of an Army Dog (1932). He wrote 21 dog books between 1932 and 1956. Before hard cover success he wrote Science Fiction. If you ask later writers like Samuel R. Delany, he wrote “incredibly bad” Science Fiction. You ask a Pulp fan like myself, he wrote the most entertaining SF of 1930. He appeared in sixteen out of twenty issues of Harry Bates’ Astounding Stories of Super-Science. He also wrote for Hugo Gernsback and T. O’Conor Sloane. In 1930, that was everybody.

Let’s back up a little. S. P. Meek was qualified to write SF because he was a military chemist. He served in WWI as a chemist and ordinance expert. He retired from the army in 1947, a colonel. During the Pulp years, he held the rank of Captain.

Meeks had two series of note:

The Microscopic Series, that Isaac Asimov talked about in Before The Golden Age (1974) and the Dr. Bird series which I wrote about at length here. He wrote two novels that Asimov felt were his best work: The Drums of Tapajos and its sequel Troyana. I haven’t separated all these out because I wanted to present his SF work in order of appearance.

“The Murgatroyd Experiment” (Amazing Stories Quarterly, January 1929)

“Futility” (Amazing Stories, July 1929)

“The Red Peril” (Amazing Stories, September 1929)

“The Osmotic Theroem” (Science Wonder Quarterly, Winter 1930) (reprinted in Fantastic Story, Spring 1951)

“The Cave of Horror” (Astounding Stories, January 1930)

“The Perfect Counterfeit” (Scientific Detective Monthly, January 1930)

“Into Space” as Sterner St. Paul (Astounding Stories, February 1930)

“The Radio Robbery” (Amazing Stories, February 1930)

“The Thief of Time”(Astounding Stories, February 1930)

“Cold Light” (Astounding Stories, March 1930)

“The Ray of Madness” (Astounding Stories, April 1930)

“Trapped in the Depths” (Wonder Stories, June 1930)

“The Gland Murders” (Amazing Detective Tales, June 1930)

“Beyond the Heaviside Layer”(Astounding Stories, July 1930)

“The Last War” (Amazing Stories, August 1930)

“The Attack From Space”(Astounding Stories, September 1930)

“The Tragedy of Spider Island” (Wonder Stories, September 1930)

“Stolen Brains” (Astounding Stories, October 1930)

“The Drums of Tapajos” (Amazing Stories, November–December 1930–January 1931)

“The Sea Terror” (Astounding Stories, December 1930)

“The Black Lamp” (Astounding Stories, February 1931)

“The Earth Cancer” (Amazing Stories, March 1931)

“When Caverns Yawned” (Astounding Stories, May 1931)

“The Port of Missing Planes” (Astounding Stories, August 1931)

“Submicroscopic” (Amazing Stories, August 1931)

“Nasturtia” (Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror, September 1931)

“Awlo of Ulm” (Amazing Stories, September 1931)

“The Solar Magnet”(Astounding Stories, October 1931)

“The Black Mass” (Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror, November 1931)

“Giants on the Earth”(Astounding Stories, December 1931–January 1932)

“Troyana” (Amazing Stories, February–March–April 1932)

“Poisoned Air”(Astounding Stories, March 1932)

“30,000 BC”(Astounding Stories, April 1932)

“The Great Drought” (Astounding Stories, May 1932)

“Vanishing Gold” (Wonder Stories, May 1932)

“The Synthetic Entity” (Wonder Stories, January 1933) (reprinted in Tales of Wonder #11, Summer 1940)

“That Fellow, Nankivell” (Fantasy Magazine, February 1934)

“The Curse of the Valedi” (Weird Tales, July 1935)

“The Mentality Machine” (Tales of Wonder, March 1939)

“The Arctic Bride” (1944)

With dog book money coming in, his best market Bates’ Astounding gone, S. P. Meek only wrote SF if the mood struck him. He tried Weird Tales once but as a cash cow that magazine was a dud. Unlike Clayton’s Strange Tales (another Bates’ magazine), it paid on publication. By 1939 he had abandoned the genre altogether.