When Clayton proposed a period adventure magazine, Bates suggested several alternatives that he said would be easier to edit, and Astounding Science Fiction was the result.
I served it in its infancy and childhood, Orlin Tremaine brought it through youth and adolescence, John Campbell guided it through adulthood and maturity.
Bates's most famous story is "Farewell to the Master" (Astounding, October 1940), which was the basis for the well-known science fiction movie of 1951, The Day the Earth Stood Still, as well as the 2008 remake and the 1973 Marvel Comics Worlds Unknown series adaptation.
[citation needed] Bates recalled the creation of the Hawk Carse science fiction series in Requiem for Astounding (1964): "From the beginning I had been bothered by the seeming inability of my writers to mix convincing character with our not-too-convincing science; so after nearly two years, with the double hope of furnishing the writers an example of a vivid hero and villain and my readers a whopping hero versus villain, I generated the first Hawk Carse story.
Both Gernsback and Moskowitz, however, wanted changes in "The Triggered Dimension" (December 1953), and Bates agreed to make the changes and arrived at the magazine's offices at 25 West Broadway to do the revisions.
[citation needed] Writer Avram Davidson credited Bates as an early influence, stating that "I will admit to the bibliography something done when I was twelve, entitled 'The Slaveship from Space'.
It was modeled after a magazine story entitled, curiously enough, 'The Slaveship from Space', and I believe the imitation was fully as bad as the original—no mean feat, I can assure you.
[citation needed] In 1951, Twentieth Century Fox released the movie The Day the Earth Stood Still, which was based on Bates' 1940 short story "Farewell to the Master".
The science fiction movie featured Michael Rennie as Klaatu, Patricia Neal, Sam Jaffe, Hugh Marlowe, and Lock Martin as the giant alien robot Gort, called Gnut in Bates' short story.
"[7] The giant alien robot, Gnut in the short story, Gort in the film, is immensely powerful, but can exhibit sadness and gentleness.
The alien explains that Gort is a member of a race of all-powerful robots who were created to eliminate any civilizations which promoted warfare in space.
Under the pseudonym of Anthony Gilmore, Bates wrote the following stories in the Hawk Carse series with Desmond W. Hall, collected in Space Hawk: The Greatest of Interplanetary Adventurers (New York: Greenberg, 1952): Boucher and McComas described the 1952 collection as "strongly commended to all connoisseurs of prose so outrageously bad as to reach its own kind of greatness.
"[10] P. Schuyler Miller described the stories as "space opera of the old, raw, gloves-off school [including] every cliche of the period," concluding "Hawk Carse was so bad that he was almost good.
"[11] Everett F. Bleiler characterized the series as "traditional pulp Western stories transplanted into space, with the addition of an Oriental villain in the mode of Sax Rohmer's Dr.