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

Sydney J. Bounds (Sydney James Bounds) (b. 1920) was born in Brighton, Sussex. In 1937 he joined the Science Fiction Association, where he met Arthur C. Clarke, William F. Temple and John Christopher (Sam Youd). During World War II, he helped found a SF fan group, the Cosmos Club, and his early short stories appeared in the Club’s fanzine, "Cosmic Cuts." His first professional sale, to publisher Gerald G. Swan, was a macabre tale involving a locked room murder where the killer was a poltergeist. Although the story never appeared, by the late 1940's Bounds had begun contributing “spicy” stories to the monthly magazines produced by Utopia Press. He was soon writing hardboiled gangster novels for John Spencer under various pseudonyms, and became a regular contributor to such SF magazines as Futuristic Science Stories, Tales of Tomorrow, Worlds of Fantasy, New Worlds Science Fiction, Science Fantasy, Authentic Science Fiction, Nebula Science Fiction, Other Worlds Science Stories and Fantastic Universe. When the science fiction magazine markets started to dry up in the 1960s, he became a prolific and reliable contributor to such anthology series as New Writings in SF, The Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories, The Fontana Book of Great Horror Stories, the Armada Monster Book and the Armada Ghost Book. His short fiction also turned up in Tales of Terror from Outer Space, Gaslight Tales of Terror and Frighteners. One of his best-known stories, “The Circus”, was scripted by George A. Romero for a 1986 episode of the syndicated television series Tales of the Darkside. In 2002, Cosmos Books issued the first-ever collections of the author’s work as two volumes of The Best of Sydney J. Bounds: Strange Portrait and Other Stories and The Best of Sydney J. Bounds: The Wayward Ship and Other Stories, which were both edited by Philip Harbottle. More recently, Bounds’ stories have appeared in Keep Out the Night, The Mammoth Book of Vampires, The Mammoth Book of New Terror and Great Ghost Stories, and he is a regular contributor to Harbottle’s Fantasy Adventures series published by Wildside Press.