Garrett Putnam Serviss, born March 24, 1851, was a professional journalist, amateur astronomer, and early science fiction writer. Born in upstate New York, he majored in science at Cornell University before pursuing a law degree at Columbia University. Though Serviss never worked as an attorney. Instead he was a journalist for The New York Sun newspaper, where he wrote their column on astronomy.

In 1898 he was approached to write the unofficial sequel to the equally unofficial, bootlegged U.S. newspaper version of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds. This was Serviss’s first work of fiction and the resulting story, Edison’s Conquest of Mars, pioneered many of the concepts that would go on to become commonplace among later Space Opera and the Planetary Romance genre pieces.

Over the years Serviss would continue to write more science fiction, along with non-fiction focused on his passion for astronomy. His talent for communicating scientific ideas in terms the layman could understand made these latter works quite popular—a status his fiction, unfortunately, never managed to attain during his lifetime.