Vaseleos Garson: Planet Stories’ Masked Man

Planet Stories was a quarterly Pulp that ran from 1939 to 1955, delivering action-oriented space opera. While to some this is trash, it was the actual spawning ground for Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles as well as the best of Leigh Brackett’s Eric John Stark stories. It was also home to Vaseleos Garson, a strangely named writer of adventure stories. Between 1944 and 1952 he penned seven stories for this magazine.

This got me thinking: did Garson appear anywhere else? Yes, once, but only at the end. That could mean a couple of things. He might be one of the editors writing under a pseudonym. (Jerome Bixby would work on Planet Stories as an editor.) Or even more likely he was a pseudonym of a prolific author like Milton Lesser or Henry Kuttner. Often these power-house producers would create a specific name for a particular magazine. (Lesser wrote under Darius John Granger and C. H. Thames in SF but Stephen Marlowe was usually saved for Mystery fiction.)

I dug a little deeper. Pseudonym yes, Pulp speedster no. Vaseleos is a very fancy version of the name Basil. Turns out Garson is really Garson, though the much more mundane “William J.”, editor, historian and winner of many literary honors including the George Washington Honor medal, member of New Alumni Association Milton College board directors, Rockford History Society, International Word Processing Association, Rockford Chamber of Commerce, etc. etc. This dude is big time academia.

The pseudonym makes sense now. Big time literary guy likes space trash, enough he writes it for fun, then publishes it under a pseudonym. He keeps the Garson but adds the fantastical Vaseleos. Imagine the suits in a meeting of the New Alumni Association Milton College board directors sitting around discussing the latest Poul Anderson or Leigh Brackett masterpiece. I don’t think so.

Here are the stories Garson produced, admittedly over a long period of time. For some reason 1947 was a particularly productive year, with three stories. This was followed by a drought of five years.

“One Against the Stars” (Planet Stories, Summer 1944)

“Prodigal Weapon” (Planet Stories, Summer 1945)

“The Shadow-Gods” (Planet Stories, Summer 1946)

“The Little Pets of Arkkan” (Planet Stories, Summer 1947)

“Test for the Pearl” (Planet Stories, Fall 1947)

“The Running of the Zar” (Planet Stories, Winter 1947)

“Acid Bath” (Planet Stories, July 1952)

“Goblin Planetoid” (Science Fiction Quarterly, August 1952)

The switch to SFQ at the end is intriguing. Was “Goblin Planetoid” rejected by Planet Stories or is there another explanation? Either way it wasn’t Garson’s last hurrah. He published a novel, Brother Earth in 1974. Described as an “elaborate but unremarkable Space Opera” by the Science Fiction Encyclopedia, it was not followed by another. He lived to 2000 but never produced another space-spanning tale.