Horace Brown Fyfe (1918–1997), who published as H. B. Fyfe, was an American science fiction writer. He was born on 30 September 1918 in Jersey City, New Jersey, educated at Stevens Academy and then Columbia University, and died on 17 November 1997 in Teaneck, New Jersey. His first published science fiction story, Locked Out, appeared in Astounding Science Fiction in February 1940. After serving in the U.S. Army during the Second World War, where he earned a Bronze Star, he returned to writing and became a regular contributor to Astounding, later Analog, with additional appearances across most of the major science fiction magazines of the era. By the time he went inactive around 1967 he had published nearly sixty stories. Fyfe's fiction centered on the interaction between humans and aliens on distant worlds, favoring problem-solving, diplomacy, and psychological tension over action-adventure — a hallmark of much of the era's hard science fiction, but with a distinctive focus on first-contact communication and misunderstanding. He worked outside writing as an engineer for RCA. His first wife, Adeline, died in 1970; he later remarried, and his second wife, Sonya, survived him. He remains a relatively minor, largely magazine-based figure of the mid-century field rather than a novelist. Much of his output was never collected in book form during his lifetime, though later small-press collections have gathered his stories.
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