Edmund Cooper

Edmund Cooper (30 April 1926 – 11 March 1982) was an English poet and prolific writer of speculative fiction, romances, technical essays, several detective stories, and a children's book. These were published under his own name and several pen names. Cooper was among the 100-plus authors in Gollancz's "SF Gateway" initiative to "make thousands of out-of print titles by classic genre authors available as eBooks", which started in October 2011. An omnibus was published in 2014 in the "SF Gateway Omnibus" series, with an introduction adapted from the entry in the online "Encyclopedia of Science Fiction".

Born in Marple, near , Cheshire, Cooper left school at the age of 15. He became engaged at 16 to a teacher four years older than he was, and married her three years later. He worked as a labourer, then a civil servant, and in 1944 he joined the Merchant Navy. After the war he trained as a teacher, and began to publish verse, then short stories, then novels. Deadly Image, the first novel to appear under his own name, was completed in 1957 and published in 1958 in the United States. (The novel was published in the UK later in 1958 in a variant form and under its better-known title The Uncertain Midnight.) The Uncertain Midnight was adapted without authorisation for Swiss television in 1969. His short story The Brain Child (1956) was adapted as the movie The Invisible Boy (1957), which featured the return of Robby the Robot from Forbidden Planet.

Cooper reviewed science fiction for the Sunday Times from 1967 until his death in 1982.

In 2009, Carol Lake published Those Summers at Moon Farm (United Writers, Cornwall: 978-1-85200-141-4), a roman à clef about the writer and family. The Author's Comments says 'Although inspired by real people, this story is fiction'. Dedicated in part to Joan and Edmund Cooper, Lake acknowledges the help of Glynis Greenman, one of Cooper's daughters, 'for sharing memories and anecdotes'.

Cooper was an atheist and an individualist. His science fiction often depicts unconventional male heroes facing unfamiliar and remote environments. His novel The Uncertain Midnight was noted for its treatment of the subject of androids, which was considered original at the time of writing. Also uniquely treated is the subject of the colonisation of planets, which is the basis of Cooper's Expendables series, published under the pen name Richard Avery (the name of the hero of Transit). The Expendables series is notable both for the diversity of its cast of characters, and for the frank nature of their conversations and attitudes on racial and sexual topics.

...
Wikipedia