Miles J. Breuer

Miles J. Breuer, as pictured in the January 1930 issue of Science Wonder Stories
Breuer's "The Raid from Mars" was the cover story in the March 1939 issue of Amazing Stories

Miles John Breuer (January 3, 1889 – October 14, 1945) was an American physician and science fiction writer. He was part of the first generation of writers to appear regularly in the pulp science fiction magazines, publishing his first story, "The Man with the Strange Head", in the January 1927 issue of Amazing Stories. His best known works are "The Gostak and the Doshes" (1930) and two stories written jointly with Jack Williamson, "The Girl from Mars" (1929) and The Birth of a New Republic (1931).

Early life and medical career

Breuer was born in Chicago, in 1889, to Charles and Barbara Breuer, Czech immigrants from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The family moved to Nebraska in 1893 while Charles pursued a medical degree at Creighton University in Omaha, and Miles grew up in the Czech community of Crete, Nebraska. Miles graduated from Crete High School in 1906, and went on to earn a master's degree from the University of Texas in 1911. After earning a medical degree from Rush Medical College which at the time was at the University of Chicago in 1915, Miles joined his father's medical practice in Nebraska. In 1916 Miles married Julia Strejic and the couple had three children, Rosalie, Stanley, and Mildred.

During World War I Miles Breuer served for twenty months in France as a first lieutenant in the Army Medical Corps. Rejoining his father's medical practice after the war, Breuer contributed frequent medical articles to Czech-language newspapers, as well as a monthly health column in the country's largest Czech-language agricultural monthly. In 1925 he published a handbook called Index of Physiotherapeutic Technic, cataloging a variety of methods for physical therapy. Breuer suffered a nervous breakdown in December 1942, and shortly afterwards moved to Los Angeles, where he continued his medical practice until 1945, when he died after a brief illness.[1]

Writing career

Breuer's first published work of fiction was a Czech-language story called "The Man Without an Appetite" that appeared in the monthly Bratrsky Vestnik about 1916.[2] Breuer had long been interested in scientific romances, particularly those by H. G. Wells.[3] When Hugo Gernsback founded the first science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories, Breuer began writing and submitting stories, publishing his first, "The Man with the Strange Head", in the January 1927 issue. Over the next fifteen years he went on to write two novels, thirty-six shorter stories, and several other items for the science fiction magazines, including collaborations with Jack Williamson and Clare Winger Harris. A great majority were published in Amazing Stories (a monthly) and Amazing Stories Quarterly.[2]

Several of Breuer's stories have been included in anthologies and in 2008 Michael R. Page of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln edited a collection, The Man with the Strange Head and Other Early Science Fiction Stories, comprising ten stories, the novel Paradise and Iron, and Breuer's editorial essay "The Future of Scientifiction".

Jack Williamson called Breuer "among the first and best of the amateurs whose work Gernsback began to print."[4] Walter Gillings stated that Breuer wrote "some of the most intriguing tales that appeared in the early volumes of Amazing Stories,"[5] and John Clute described his work as crudely written, but intelligent and noted for new ideas.[6]

Works by Miles J. Breuer

This list is limited to speculative fiction as cataloged by the Internet Speculative Fiction Database. For Breuer as author or co-author, ISFDB lists the following one 1916 story and 44 items published from 1927 to 1942. It also catalogs ten letters to Amazing Stories and one to Wonder Stories, all 1927–31, and one 1930 illustration.[2]

Short stories

Novels

Poems

Essays

References

  1. ↑ Obituary, Lincoln Evening Journal, October 16, 1945.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 Miles J. Breuer at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDB). Retrieved 2013-04-06. Select a title to see its linked publication history and general information. Select a particular edition (title) for more data at that level, such as a front cover image or linked contents.
  3. ↑ Michael R. Page, "Introduction", The Man With the Strange Head, Miles J. Breuer, 2008, p. xvii.
  4. ↑ Wonder's Child: My Life in Science Fiction by Jack Williamson, 2nd ed., 2005, pp. 61-62.
  5. ↑ "Miles J. Breuer," Twentieth-Century Science-Fiction Writers, ed. Curtis C. Smith, 2nd ed., 1986, pp. 78-79.
  6. ↑ "Miles J. Breuer", The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, 1993, p. 157.
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