Jesús de Aragón

Jesús de Aragón (1893–1973) was a Spanish writer of works in the fantasy and science fiction genres, sometimes with a gothic flair. He is often called the "Spanish Jules Verne" because of some thematic similarities he had with the French author, though Aragón's actual style was more heavily pulp-like, influenced by American pulps via Spanish-language translations of American series like The Shadow and Doc Savage books.

Early life Aragón was born in 1893 in Valsain, Spain. When Aragón was six years old, his father died, after which the family moved to Madrid. As a young man, Aragón was known to have beautiful handwriting, and found work as a professional scribe, copying whole books by hand. He went to college and studied to be a railway engineer.

While Aragón wouldn't be credited for any creative work on the novel, this would still lead him to his own publishing contract, and in that same year he wrote two novels of his own in quick succession: Viaje al fondo del océano (Journey to the bottom of the ocean) and Cuarenta mil kilómetros a bordo del aeroplano "Fantasmo" (Forty Thousand Kilometers Aboard the Airplane Fantasma). As might be suggested by their titles, these works were somewhat derivative of two Jules Verne novels, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas and Around the World in Eighty Days, respectively, as well as other elements of Verne's Voyages extraordinaires.

His next novel wouldn't be published until five years later, Los piratas del aire, a Yellow Peril novel in which a villainous man named Abdahalla-Fan, along with his gorilla henchman, pilots a dragon-shaped war zeppelin to threaten all of India. He is defeated by the English hero Lord Ewerard Gleenmore.

He stopped writing in 1964, after which not much is known of him until his death in 1973. Several of his works were translated into French and Hungarian, but he has seldom, if ever, been translated into English.