Wilmar H(ouse) Shiras was born in Boston in 1908, and died in 1990.
She married her husband when she was 18 and they raised five children. It was for them that she began telling the stories that would ultimately become her single great work. There are some authors who appear to have only one good book in them, and Shiras may have been one of that sort, since she never produced another although she lived for many years after publication, first of portions of the book, then of the whole book.
But in 1948 she submitted a novella, In Hiding, to John W. Campbell, the novella appeared in the November issue of Astounding and made an immediate impression. Shiras had tapped into the angst of the time about atom bombs, radiation and mutation, and her story, about a boy who is a genius well beyond any human before, far from playing on those fears, showed the essential terrible loneliness that such a child would suffer who has no peer even amongst most adults. It became an instant classic, and readers eagerly awaited more.
They received it with the publication of the next novella, Opening Doors, in 1949, followed by the third, New Foundations, the same year. Shiras then added these together, and they became the first three chapters of her five-chapter book, and the entire book, Children of the Atom appeared from Gnome Press in 1953.
The book is a tour de force, at a time when many authors were writing work that indicated all radiation-produced mutations would be inimical to human life, hideous, or a dead end, Shiras wrote about children who were none of these things. (The Midwich Cuckoos is a good example of the other type of book.) In her work the child is both a genius and a rather lonely boy. Raised by his grandmother, he is quiet, introspective, and a loner in less obvious ways. He secretly writes and corresponds with adults who believe him to be an adult. He has articles published in scientific journals whose editors believe him to be highly educated and a scientist.
But it is not until a local psychiatrist befriends him and discovers the child’s secret that the boy finds a genuine friend who can know and accept him as he really is. Inspired by the possibility that there may be more children out there created by the same event as produced this boy, the doctor gradually discovers more of these children and, understanding their deep needs and the dangers that will beset them when/if they are discovered, he establishes – with financial aid from the boy’s grandparents – a place where they, he, and several other sympathetic adults, can live, work and learn together.
It is clear from the start that the children have already outstripped him in everything but emotional maturity, but he knows the problems they do face now and will face later and accepts that in a few years he will be as a child to their adults. He believes that the human race needs them, and that only with what they can do and bring will humanity reach emotional maturity themselves and only with the children’s later leadership will humanity go to the stars without destroying themselves.
When this book appeared in the 1950s, it was said that its intellectual analysis and the writer’s deep knowledge of people and the philosophical foundation of the writing were another step in SF’s coming of age. That may sound like a great deal for an SF novel, but Andre Norton in discussing it with me in 1991 soon after Shiras’s death praised it in similar terms. She had known Wilmar Shiras, and said that in her opinion the book was one of the best ever written in the genre.
There are still copies of this book to be found. In 1959 the UK SFBC published it in hardcover in England, (the copy I have – passed on from a friend’s estate) and looking at it on Amazon last year I saw that they had nine copies available, and in a different edition again for those quoted in this piece. In some ways this book may appear simple to modern readers, in its time it was hugely innovative, but other writers have since used the theme, however mostly they didn’t deal with it as well, and this original work is still a great read and worthy of a place on anyone’s shelves as forerunner of a new sub-genre. Highly recommended.

Sterling Edmund Lanier was born on the 18th of December 1927 and died on June 28th 2007. However, like many of the other authors in this series, his writing output was small, and he has often been overlooked by readers who started reading after Lanier’s heyday of the 1970s and 1980s. Lanier was a man of many talents, which may have contributed to his low writing output. He was a Harvard graduate, served in the army in WWII, was an anthropological/archaeological researcher in the Winterthur Museum for several years, and then worked as an editor – his great claim to fame in that being that while he worked as Editor at Chiltern Books in Philadelphia he strongly backed the publication of DUNE, a work that had been continually rejected by many other publishers. Lanier began selling his SF in 1961, with six books and a number of short stories appearing before he stopped writing in 1986. Lanier was something of a Renaissance Man, who took up sculpting after he ceased to write, and some of his sculptures are exhibited in major venues like the Smithsonian.
His first novel is regarded by some as his most important work (although personally I prefer Menace Under Marswood) but Heiro’s Journey is a reader-seizing book set on a 5000 years post-holocaust Earth, it was followed eight years later by the sequel, The Unforsaken Heiro. Both works were forerunners of common themes today, being a battle between ecologists (The Eleveners) and those who want to bring back the earth-polluting practices of the distant past (the Unclean) with other groups caught in the middle, some intelligent bears, and what seems to be a society of dryads. This duo of books is a well-thought-out pair, with Lanier clearly utilizing his background in anthropology and archaeology to build credible long-term outcomes after the destruction of our original civilization and what might then spring from the ruins after long-tern radiation and bacterial warfare have ravaged the world.
Two further books, actually short story collections, are excellent, they follow very much the same format as Tales of the Black Widowers, Tales from the White Hart etc. in that they are a series of stories being told by a club member to other members, and they are pithy, amusing, and often very clever. His final two books were standalones and also compelling reading. I feel that it was a huge pity Lanier stopped writing and took up sculpture – although art-lovers may disagree. But he had the ability to take a previously superficially used theme and turn it inside out, producing something new and fascinating.
At least one of his short stories – Join Our Gang? – is free from the Gutenburg Press and other works may be in free download elsewhere since as was common with writers working in the 60s/70s, at least some – if not most or all – of their work was often not re-copyrighted after the initial 28 year period and ultimately fell into the public domain. My recommendations are the Brigadier Ffellowes stories, and Menace Under Marswood. The latter book is a gorgeous hotchpotch of Kipling undertones, with perhaps Leinster’s The Forgotten Planet (Ace 1953) as overtones. This book called out for a sequel if not two, but never received one. A great pity as I’d have loved to hear more of Mohammad Slater and his pet, Grabbit. Lanier produced 13 uncollected short stories, two collections, and four books in his twenty-five year writing career and almost all he did was quality. I can only wonder, if he had continued to write, what other outstanding SF books and stories we would have had.
Eric Flint has, over the past decade, been making a habit of re-collecting work by earlier writers and reintroducing them to the Sf/F reading public via Baen. I believe that Sterling Lanier would be an excellent writer for him to consider. The six books fall naturally into pairs, and the 19 short stories that were published could probably been assigned to similar categories. So three volumes would neatly cover Lanier’s output if they are either all in the public domain by now or if Lanier’s heirs would agree.

Bibliography
Books:
Hiero’s Journey (1975)
The Unforsaken Hiero (1983)
The Peculiar Exploits of Brigadier Ffellowes (1971)
The Curious Quests of Brigadier Ffellowes (1986)
The War for the Lot (1969)
Menace Under Marswood (1983)

Short stories:

“And the Voice of the Turtle” (1972)
“The Brigadier in Check — and Mate” (1986)
“Commander in the Mist” (1982)
“Deathchild” (1968)
“A Father’s Tale” (1974)
“A Feminine Jurisdiction” (1969)
“Fraternity Brother” (1969)
“Ghost of a Crown” (1976)
“His Coat So Gay” (1970)
“His Only Safari” (1970)
“Join Our Gang? ” (1961)
“The Kings of the Sea” (1968)
“The Leftovers” (1969)
“Never Cry Human” (1970)
“No Traveler Returns” (1974)
“Soldier Key” (1968)
“Such Stuff as Dreams” (1968)
“The Syndicated Time” (1978)
“Whose Short Happy Life? ” (1968)