<span class="SFPTagline"> From SCIFIPEDIA </span>

British writer Kenneth Bulmer (January 14, 1921 – December 16, 2006) was one of the most prolific writers in the genre from the beginning his career during the 1950s, under his own and various pseudonyms, until the last two decades of his life when most of his new books were historical adventures and thrillers. Bulmer's first few novels appeared only in the United Kingdom and were exciting but forgettable space adventures like Galactic Intrigue (1953) and World Aflame (1954), crudely written but fast paced and sometimes imaginative.

During the late 1950s he began selling to Ace, and his work demonstrated considerably more sophistication. Novels like The Earth Gods Are Coming (1960) and Beyond the Silver Sky (1961) were still basically pulp adventures, but Bulmer had cleaned up his prose, did a fair job of developing characters, and employed more complex and plausible plots. This improvement continued throughout the 1960s and several of the novels from this period, now largely forgotten, age quite well, e.g. The Wizard of Starship Poseidon (1963), which deals with piracy in space, Land Beyond the Map (1965), and perhaps his best, The Doomsday Men (1965), wherein a future detective gains clues by reading the last thoughts from the brains of murder victims.

Bulmer launched the first of several series that would subsequently dominate his work with The Key to Irunium (1967), a jaunt through parallel universes which he followed up with six sequels. In 1972, writing as Alan Burt Akers, he started the "Dray Prescott" series of Edgar Rice Burroughs pastiches, which reached a total of thirty-seven titles before coming to a halt in the late 1980s, by then appearing as by Dray Prescott. The series became so repetitive that later volumes appear almost to be satirizing the earlier ones. Bulmer also wrote another series as Tully Zetford and numerous stand alone novels, but these were generally less interesting than his early work.

In addition to his SF, Bulmer wrote several sword and sorcery adventures under his own name and as Manning Norvil, but they were uniformly unmemorable. He took over the editor's job for the long running British original anthology series, New Writings in SF, following the death of its original editor, John Carnell. Bulmer's SF novels have also appeared as by Karl Maras, and Philip Kent. His historical adventures as Adam Hardy are among his best work.