Book lovers discussion

I'll never forget when some bright librarian here on GR decided to change John Christopher's name to his real one, Samuel Youd. I was very confused. Wikipedia has a good write up on him. Apparently he was a very prolific author who also wrote under other names; Stanley Winchester, Hilary Ford, William Godfrey, William Vine, Peter Graaf, Peter Nichols, and Anthony Rye.

See here for the details:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Youd

One of the more famous (& funniest) pen names is Cordwainer Bird. After having a script changed to something he hated, Harlan Ellison put into all his future movie contracts that he could change his name to Bird, if he hated it. He tried with the Star Trek episode (City on the Edge of Forever?) but Rodenberry didn't honor it. That was voted the best original Star Trek episode ever, although I seem to recall it was re-written by a couple of others before it was finally filmed.

I think my favorite is Kilgore Trout, though. This is actually a fictitious SF writer created by Kurt Vonnegut. The character tickled a lot of SF writers & Philip José Farmer received permission to actually write Venus on the Half Shell attributed to Kilgore Trout. It was a fun read - once.