Gerald Vance

Gerald Vance is not the name of any single real author but a shared collective pseudonym used by the American publisher Ziff-Davis. Between 1941 and 1958 it was employed by a number of science fiction writers, including William P. McGivern, Chester S. Geier, Rog Phillips, Randall Garrett, Robert Silverberg and Henry Slesar. Four works under this byline are held in the collection: Larson's Luck, Vital Ingredient, Monsoons of Death and Equation of Doom. Because the name was shared by many hands, no unified personal biography can be traced, and public information is limited. Judging from the surviving works, these are mostly mid-twentieth-century American popular science fiction short stories, often involving adventure, disaster and scientific speculation, tightly plotted and marked by the style of the pulp magazine era; they are useful texts for studying Ziff-Davis science fiction publishing and the phenomenon of the collective pseudonym.