Herbert Rossoff was a Human science fiction writer who lived during the 20th century. In 1953, he was a writer for the Incredible Tales of Scientific Wonder magazine in New York City.
The stories he wrote for the magazine include "I Have No Voice So I Must Shout", "Quantity of the Monster" and "Hazardous Images".
Rossoff considered himself to be one of the stars of the magazine's staff and was not shy about declaring this, or in using it for leverage. Though he often threatened to quit and go work for the magazine's chief rival Galaxy, where he felt his name – next to those of Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein – was the only thing keeping Galaxy from being complete, he never made good on his threat to Douglas Pabst. Instead, Rossoff used his position to negotiate small raises for himself, and to get more fresh donuts for the office, a fact that amused his co-worker Kay Eaton greatly.
Unusually for the time, Rossoff believed in racial equality and frequently stood up for Benny Russell, an African-American writer at the magazine. This often brought him into conflict with Pabst, which grew more heated when Russell began writing stories about a space station run by a black captain. Pabst accused Rossoff of being a communist, which he adamantly denied and in turn accused Pabst of being a fascist.
After Pabst refused to publish Russell's story Deep Space Nine as it featured a black captain in command of a futuristic space station, Albert Macklin suggested that Russell make the story a dream. Although Rossoff believed that making it a dream undermined the story, Pabst did not take his opinion into consideration. (DS9 episode & novelization: Far Beyond the Stars)
Russell based the character of Quark on Rossoff. (DS9 novelization: Far Beyond the Stars)
External link[]
- Herbert Rossoff article at Memory Alpha, the wiki for canon Star Trek.