Marilyn "Lynn" Venable (June 3, 1927 – March 31, 2025) was an American writer.
Early life Lynn Venable was born on June 3, 1927, and was from New Jersey.Angela Hill, "Give'm Hill: El Cerrito Woman Lends 'Twilight Zone' Inspiration" Mercury News (December 26, 2012).
Career Venable's short story "Time Enough at Last" (If Magazine 1953)Lynn Venable, "Time Enough at Last" If Magazine (January 1953). was adapted for television as an episode of The Twilight Zone in 1959, starring Burgess Meredith.Don Presnell and Marty McGee, A Critical History of Television’s The Twilight Zone, 1959–1964 (McFarland 2015): 39-41. The story is frequently anthologizedForrest J. Ackerman and Pam Keesey, eds., Womanthology (Sense of Wonder Press 2003). Evelyn E. Smith, Ann Walker, Barbara Constant, eds., Women Resurrected: Stories from Women Science Fiction Writers of the 50s (Resurrected Press 2011). and discussed by scholars, who note that it was published in the same year as Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 and includes similar themes about reading and books.Mercè Cuenca, "'The Most Dangerous Enemy of Truth and Freedom': 'Fahrenheit 451' and the Enforcement of Innocence in Early Cold War America" in Cynthia Stretch, Cristina Alsina Rísquez, eds., Innocence and Loss: Representations of War and National Identity in the United States (Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2014): 136-138.
Other stories by Venable include "Homesick" (Galaxy Science Fiction Magazine 1952), "Punishment Fit the Crime" (Other Worlds 1953), "The Missing Room" (Weird Tales 1953), "Doppelganger" (Mystic Magazine 1954), "Parry's Paradox" (Authentic Science Fiction 1955), and "Grove of the Unborn" (Fantastic Universe 1957). "Someone once asked me, 'Why do you write these things? Why do you like to scare yourself?'" she told a reporter in 2012. "I said, 'I don't scare myself. I scare other people.'"
Personal life and death Venable married at 18 and moved to Dallas, Texas.Eric Leif Davin, Partners in Wonder: Women and the Birth of Science Fiction, 1926-1965 (Lexington Books 2005): 412. By 1988 she had moved again to Walnut Creek, California."Dear Abby" advice column, Northwest Herald (October 11, 1988): 13. via Newspapers.com
In 2012, Venable was living in a retirement community in El Cerrito, California. She died on March 31, 2025, at the age of 97.
References
External links
Episode 1 of the podcast Buxom Blondes with Rayguns features two 1952 stories by Lynn Venable, read by Hannah Wolfe (January 27, 2018).