Volsted Gridban / Ted Tubb cover gallery

Back in the early days of his career, Ted Tubb wrote 30 or so original paperbacks for the cheapest end of the market here in the UK. Tubb learned how to write by writing, so these are perhaps not the greatest SF novels ever published. Tubb was paid at a rate of £1 a thousand words, the books were rushed out and published, for the most part, under pen-names.

However, before you dismiss them, he was a serious writer of science fiction, and even the novice Tubb was ten times better than most of the writers who foisted SF on the public at that time. He was one of only a tiny handful – John Brunner, Edmund Cooper, John Rackham, Ken Bulmer, Syd Bounds – who survived that post-WWII boom in SF in the UK and continued to write SF.

When Scion Ltd. ran into financial problems in 1952, Tubb switched to Milestone Publications. Scion, however, had created the Volsted Gridban pen-name and were able to recover the name, which they promptly handed over to John Russell Fearn. But that's another story and another gallery.

Alien Universe
Scion, (Nov) 1952, [96pp], 1/6. Cover by George Ratcliff
revised as The Green Helix by E. C. Tubb, Linford, Mar 2009.

Reverse Universe
Scion, (Dec) 1952, 128pp, 1/6. Cover by John Richards

Planetoid Disposals Ltd.
Milestone 1019, (Jan) 1953, 112pp, 1/6. Cover by Ron Turner

DeBracy's Drug
Scion, (Feb) 1953, 127pp, 1/6. Cover by John Richards
as by E. C. Tubb, 2004.
revised as The Freedom Army by E. C. Tubb, Linford, Apr 2009.

Fugitive of Time
Milestone, (Feb) 1953, 112pp, 1/6. Cover by Ron Turner