The Red Brain by Donald Wandrei

On the last surviving star, a civilization that has mastered time, matter, and life itself faces a slow extinction they cannot stop. When a newly created mind claims victory over the unstoppable force consuming the universe, one decision will determine whether anything at all remains. The Red Brain by Donald Wandrei. That’s next on The Lost Sci-Fi Podcast.

Author Donald Wandrei makes his debut on the podcast today. Born in 1908 in St. Paul, Minnesota, he built a reputation as a science fiction writer, poet, and editor—and, like many writers of his era, he shared a strong connection with H. P. Lovecraft.

As a teenager, Wandrei hitchhiked from Minnesota to Rhode Island to meet Lovecraft in person. That journey led to his involvement in the Lovecraft Circle, alongside writers such as Frank Belknap Long and Clark Ashton Smith.

Wandrei also played a crucial role behind the scenes. Without his intervention, The Call of Cthulhu might never have appeared in Weird Tales. He wrote directly to the magazine’s publisher, making it clear that if Lovecraft’s work wasn’t accepted, the author would take his stories elsewhere.

In late 1937, after H. P. Lovecraft’s death, Donald Wandrei and August Derleth tried to publish a memorial collection of his best weird fiction. When major publishers passed, they created their own company—Arkham House—to release Lovecraft’s work in hardcover.

The name comes from Lovecraft’s fictional city of Arkham, Massachusetts.

Donald Wandrei went on to write nearly 100 science fiction short stories, and he was just 16 when he wrote the one you’re about to hear—his first to be published, in Weird Tales magazine in October 1927 on page 531, The Red Brain by Donald Wandrei…

Next on The Lost Sci-Fi Podcast, Humanity finally reaches Mars expecting discovery, only to stumble into a revelation that quietly rewrites Earth’s entire history. What begins as triumph turns into a cosmic joke with unsettling implications no one is prepared to accept. Mimsy’s Joke by Millard Grimes.

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