Mari Wolf (born August 27, 1927) was an American science fiction writer and magazine columnist. She is credited with the first use of the word "droid" for a robot, in a science fiction story.
Mari Wolf was raised in Laguna Beach, California, and studied mathematics at the University of California Los Angeles. She was also interested in rocketry as a young woman.[1]
Wolf worked in the aerospace industry in Southern California, and was described as a "calculating-machine operator" at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1955.[2] She was active in the earliest days of science fiction fandom and publishing in Los Angeles, and a member of the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society.[3] She wrote a monthly column about fandom, including fan conventions and fanzines. "Fandora's Box" appeared in Imagination magazine from 1951 to 1956.[4] [5] When she resigned from the column after her divorce, Robert Bloch took over as the feature's author.[6]
Stories by Wolf include "Robots of the World! Arise!" (If: Worlds of Science Fiction, 1952), "An Empty Bottle" (If: Worlds of Science Fiction, 1952), "The House on the Vacant Lot" (Fantastic Story, 1952), "Prejudice" (Destiny, 1953), "The Statue" (If: Worlds of Science Fiction, 1953), "Homo Inferior" (If: Worlds of Science Fiction, 1953), "The First Day of Spring" (If: Worlds of Science Fiction, 1954), and "The Very Secret Agent" (If: Worlds of Science Fiction, 1954). The word "droid" for a robot first appears in a 1952 story by Wolf ("Robots of the World! Arise!").[7] Her mystery novel, The Golden Frame, was published in 1961.
A retrospective anthology, Mari Wolf Resurrected: The Complete Short Stories of Mari Wolf, was published in 2011.[8]
Mari Wolf married fellow science fiction writer Rog Phillips in 1951, in Chicago. They divorced in 1955.