Eric Frank Russell was one of the most prolific producers of science fiction in England during the 1950s. Although his first novel, Sinister Barrier (1943), is often cited in histories of science fiction for its connections with the magazine Unknown, he was best known to readers of science fiction for his short stories, more than half of which appeared in John W. Campbell's Astounding Stories (later Astounding Science-Fiction). The salient characteristics of his short fiction are an ironic, often humorous questioning of hierarchies and a casual approach to the "science" content in a period when "hard" science fiction was still dominant. His novels are less varied in content than the short stories, tending to focus on the subjection of the human race to external manipulation, which is rarely benevolent.

Russell was born on 6 January 1905 in Camberley, Surrey; his father was an instructor at the Military College, Sandhurst, and Russell...