James Benjamin Blish was an American science fiction and fantasy writer. He is best known for his Cities in Flight novels and his series of Star Trek novelizations written with his wife, J. A. Lawrence. His novel A Case of Conscience won the Hugo Award. He is credited with creating the term "gas giant" to refer to large planetary bodies.
Damon Francis Knight was an American science fiction author, editor, and critic. He is the author of "To Serve Man", a 1950 short story adapted for The Twilight Zone. He was married to fellow writer Kate Wilhelm.
Galaxy Science Fiction was an American digest-size science fiction magazine, published in Boston from 1950 to 1980. It was founded by a French-Italian company, World Editions, which was looking to break into the American market. World Editions hired as editor H. L. Gold, who rapidly made Galaxy the leading science fiction magazine of its time, focusing on stories about social issues rather than technology.
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction is a U.S. fantasy and science fiction magazine, first published in 1949 by Mystery House, a subsidiary of Lawrence Spivak's Mercury Press. Editors Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas had approached Spivak in the mid-1940s about creating a fantasy companion to Spivak's existing mystery title, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. The first issue was titled The Magazine of Fantasy, but the decision was quickly made to include science fiction as well as fantasy, and the title was changed correspondingly with the second issue. F&SF was quite different in presentation from the existing science fiction magazines of the day, most of which were in pulp format: it had no interior illustrations, no letter column, and text in a single-column format, which in the opinion of science fiction historian Mike Ashley "set F&SF apart, giving it the air and authority of a superior magazine".
The World of Null-A, sometimes written The World of Ā, is a 1948 science fiction novel by Canadian-American writer A. E. van Vogt. It was originally published as a three-part serial in 1945 in Astounding Stories. It incorporates concepts from the General Semantics of Alfred Korzybski. The name Ā refers to non-Aristotelian logic.
The Golden Age of Science Fiction, often identified in the United States as the years 1938–1946, was a period in which a number of foundational works of science fiction literature appeared. In the history of science fiction, the Golden Age follows the "pulp era" of the 1920s and 1930s, and precedes New Wave science fiction of the 1960s and 1970s. The 1950s are, in this scheme, a transitional period. Robert Silverberg, who came of age in the 1950s, saw that decade as the true Golden Age. According to historian Adam Roberts, "the phrase Golden Age valorises a particular sort of writing: 'Hard SF', linear narratives, heroes solving problems or countering threats in a space-opera or technological-adventure idiom."
The Milford Writer's Workshop, or more properly Milford Writers' Conference, is an annual science fiction writer's event founded by Damon Knight, among others, in the mid-1950s, in Milford, Pennsylvania. It was so named because Knight, Judith Merril, and James Blish lived in Milford when it was founded. It moved to the United Kingdom in 1972 and has run successfully ever since on an annual basis.
NESFA Press is the publishing arm of the New England Science Fiction Association, Inc. The NESFA Press primarily produces three types of books:
Adventures in Time and Space is an American anthology of science fiction stories edited by Raymond J. Healy and J. Francis McComas and published in 1946 by Random House. A second edition was also published in 1946 that eliminated the last five stories. A Modern Library edition was issued in 1957. When it was re-released in 1975 by Ballantine Books, Analog book reviewer Lester del Rey referred to it as a book he often gave to people in order to turn them onto the genre. It is now once again out of print.
This is a bibliography of works by Damon Knight.
A fix-up is a novel created from several short fiction stories that may or may not have been initially related or previously published. The stories may be edited for consistency, and sometimes new connecting material, such as a frame story or other interstitial narration, is written for the new work. The term was coined by the science fiction writer A. E. van Vogt, who published several fix-ups of his own, including The Voyage of the Space Beagle, but the practice exists outside of science fiction. The use of the term in science fiction criticism was popularised by the first (1979) edition of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, edited by Peter Nicholls, which credited van Vogt with the creation of the term. The name “fix-up” comes from the changes that the author needs to make in the original texts, to make them fit together as though they were a novel. Foreshadowing of events from the later stories may be jammed into an early chapter of the fix-up, and character development may be interleaved throughout the book. Contradictions and inconsistencies between episodes are usually worked out.
There have been many attempts at defining science fiction. This is a list of definitions that have been offered by authors, editors, critics and fans over the years since science fiction became a genre. Definitions of related terms such as "science fantasy", "speculative fiction", and "fabulation" are included where they are intended as definitions of aspects of science fiction or because they illuminate related definitions—see e.g. Robert Scholes's definitions of "fabulation" and "structural fabulation" below. Some definitions of sub-types of science fiction are included, too; for example see David Ketterer's definition of "philosophically-oriented science fiction". In addition, some definitions are included that define, for example, a science fiction story, rather than science fiction itself, since these also illuminate an underlying definition of science fiction.
Advent:Publishers is an American publishing house. It was founded by Earl Kemp and other members of the University of Chicago Science Fiction Club, including Sidney Coleman, in 1955, to publish criticism, history, and bibliography of the science fiction field, beginning with Damon Knight's In Search of Wonder.
The Best Science Fiction Stories: 1951 is a 1951 anthology of science fiction short stories edited by Everett F. Bleiler and T. E. Dikty. An abridged edition was published in the UK by Grayson in 1952 under the title "The Best Science Fiction Stories: Second Series". Most of the stories had originally appeared in 1950 in the magazines Fantasy and Science Fiction, Worlds Beyond, Astounding SF, Other Worlds, Galaxy Science Fiction, Fantastic Story Quarterly, Startling Stories, Collier's Weekly, Thrilling Wonder Stories and Weird Tales.
Empire of the Atom is a science fiction novel by Canadian-American writer A. E. van Vogt. It was first published in 1957 by Shasta Publishers in an edition of 2,000 copies. The novel is a fix-up of the first five of van Vogt's Gods stories, which originally appeared in the magazine Astounding. The remaining Gods stories are combined in the sequel The Wizard of Linn. A genealogical chart of the ruling family of the Empire of Linn is included.
Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 12 (1950) is the twelfth volume of Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories, which is a series of short story collections, edited by Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg, which attempts to list the great science fiction stories from the Golden Age of Science Fiction. They date the Golden Age as beginning in 1939 and lasting until 1963. The book was later reprinted as the second half of Isaac Asimov Presents The Golden Years of Science Fiction, Sixth Series with the first half being Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 11 (1949). It was the last book in the series to be reprinted as part of the Isaac Asimov Presents The Golden Years of Science Fiction series. This volume was originally published by DAW books in September 1984.
The Long Loud Silence is a science fiction novel by American writer Wilson Tucker. It was first published in hardback edition by Rinehart & Co. in 1952, followed by Dell paperback editions in 1952 and 1954.
Science Fiction Forum was a critical journal of science fiction. It was created by Damon Knight and James Blish in 1957. Lester del Rey was also an editor.
Omnibus of Science Fiction is an anthology of science fiction short stories edited by Groff Conklin. It was first published in hardcover by Crown Publishers in 1952, and reprinted in 1953; a book club edition was issued by the same publisher with the Science Fiction Book Club in the same year. Later editions were issued by Bonanza Books/Crown Publishers in 1984 and Chatham River Press in 1984. An abridged paperback version including eleven of its forty-three stories was published by Berkley Books in August 1956 under the variant title Science Fiction Omnibus and reprinted in November 1963. A two-volume British edition, also abridged, was published in hardcover by Grayson & Grayson in 1953-1954 under the variant titles Strange Travels in Science Fiction and Strange Adventures in Science Fiction; together, they included twenty-two of the original forty-three stories.
The Shape of Things is an anthology of science fiction short stories edited by Damon Knight. It was first published in paperback by Popular Library in 1965.
