Mari Wolf

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Mari Wolf

Mari Wolf (born August 27, 1926)[1] was an American science fiction writer and magazine columnist. She is credited with the first use of the word "droid" for a robot, in a science fiction story.

Mari Wolf was raised in Laguna Beach, California, and studied mathematics at the University of California Los Angeles. She was also interested in rocketry as a young woman.[2]

Career

Wolf worked in the aerospace industry in Southern California,[2] and was described as a "calculating-machine operator" at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1955.[3] She was active in the earliest days of science fiction fandom and publishing in Los Angeles, and a member of the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society.[4] She wrote a monthly column about fandom, including fan conventions and fanzines. "Fandora's Box" appeared in Imagination magazine from 1951 to 1956.[5][6] When she resigned from the column after her divorce, Robert Bloch took over as the feature's author.[7]

Stories by Wolf include "Robots of the World! Arise!" (If: Worlds of Science Fiction, 1952), "An Empty Bottle" (If: Worlds of Science Fiction, 1952), "The House on the Vacant Lot" (Fantastic Story, 1952), "Prejudice" (Destiny, 1953), "The Statue" (If: Worlds of Science Fiction, 1953), "Homo Inferior" (If: Worlds of Science Fiction, 1953), "The First Day of Spring" (If: Worlds of Science Fiction, 1954), and "The Very Secret Agent" (If: Worlds of Science Fiction, 1954). The word "droid" for a robot first appears in a 1952 story by Wolf ("Robots of the World! Arise!").[8] Her mystery novel, The Golden Frame, was published in 1961.

A retrospective anthology, Mari Wolf Resurrected: The Complete Short Stories of Mari Wolf, was published in 2011.[9]

Personal life

References

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