John D. Clark

John Drury Clark, Ph.D. (August 15, 1907 – July 6, 1988) was an American rocket fuel developer, chemist, and science fiction writer. He was instrumental in the revival of interest in Robert E. Howard's Conan stories and influenced the writing careers of L. Sprague de Camp, Fletcher Pratt, and other authors.

Life and career Clark was born in Fairbanks, Alaska. He attended the University of Alaska, This design was used by Life Magazine for a striking and influential illustration as part of a special number on the elements, 16 May 1949. It inspired the artist Edgar Longman, whose mural was a prominent exhibit in the Festival of Britain science exhibition, London, 1951. Clark came up with a new version in 1950, but this did not have the same success.

Clark moved to Schenectady in Upstate New York in the early 1930s, taking a job with General Electric. A few years later he moved to New York City. Their marriage later ended in divorce.

Clark was the author of Ignition! An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants (Rutgers University Press, 1972) which he dedicated to his wife Inga.

During the Clarks' married life they lived in an "unconventional" house in Newfoundland, in the Green Pond section of Rockaway Township, Morris County, New Jersey, where Clark continued to reside in his later years, until his death. He died on July 6, 1988, after a long illness and series of strokes at St. Clare's Hospital in Denville, New Jersey, near his home. When additional stories failed to sell he abandoned fiction writing while remaining active in science fiction circles. This experience did, however, prompt de Camp to launch his own career as a science fiction writer, first with short stories and then with a novel in collaboration with their mutual friend Miller.

Clark furthered de Camp's career in another way by introducing him into Fletcher Pratt's war-gaming circle, and to Pratt himself, in 1939. De Camp and Pratt went on to write some of the most celebrated light fantasy of the 1940s, the Harold Shea and Gavagan's Bar stories.

Clark also provided L. Ron Hubbard with the germ for his humorous fantasy novella The Case of the Friendly Corpse, published in the August 1941 issue of Unknown. According to de Camp, in the 1930s Clark and a friend named Mark Baldwin had "concocted a prospectus for an imaginary College of the Unholy Names", which Clark lent to Hubbard in 1941. Hubbard then built his story around the setting.

Clark's first marriage led to the establishment of the all-male literary banqueting club the Trap Door Spiders, founded in 1944 by Pratt. As the new Mrs. Clark was reportedly unpopular with Pratt and others of his friends, the club gave them an excuse to spend time with him without her. The Trap Door Spiders later served as the model for Isaac Asimov's fictional group of mystery solvers the Black Widowers. Clark himself was fictionalized as the James Drake character.

In 1952 Clark provided the scenario for and edited the Twayne Science Fiction Triplet The Petrified Planet, which has been described as "the first 'shared world' anthology". The scenario postulated a star system inhabited by silicon-based life forms, and was used as the basis for the three novellas by Pratt, H. Beam Piper and Judith Merril forming the body of the work. An excerpt from Clark's introduction ("The Silicone World") was reissued in the December, 1952 issue of Startling Stories, and the whole was reprinted in the 1983 Ace edition of Piper's contribution to the book, Uller Uprising. However, the Startling Stories excerpt has also been credited to Pratt, who supposedly utilized Clark's name as a pseudonym.

Isaac Asimov, whom Clark first met in 1942, wrote the foreword to his book Ignition!