Raymond E. Banks

Raymond Eugene Banks (8 November 1918 – 3 August 1996) was an American science fiction writer active in the 1950s and 60s. Most of his work was signed "Raymond E. Banks," but he also used slight variations of his name (such as "Ray Banks", "Ray E. Banks", "R. E. Banks", and "Ramond Banks"); he also (rarely) wrote under the pen names "Fred Freair" and "Ralph Burch". In a brief biographical note in the 1977 anthology Alpha 8, Robert Silverberg described him as "one of the most promising of the postwar crop [of SF writers]", but also noted that "his name is rarely mentioned today." According to the note, Banks had sold a fantasy story to Esquire soon after his demobilization in 1946, and had begun writing full-time in 1952. During the next ten years, he published around forty SF stories, mostly in what Silverberg termed "fairly ephemeral magazines" (such as Dynamic Science Fiction); he also regularly appeared in the higher-profile Astounding and Galaxy.