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Roger Elwood (born 1933) is an American science fiction writer and editor, perhaps best known for having edited a large number of anthologies and collections for a variety of publishers in the early 1970s.

Biography

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Born and raised in Southern New Jersey, Roger Elwood started his professional writing career shortly after graduating from high school.

Elwood edited two wrestling magazines, "The Big Book of Wrestling" and "Official Wrestling Guide", on a contract basis in 1971–72 for Jalart House, an Arizona publisher, and regularly photographed matches (wrestling magazines placed a premium on photos rather than text). He became a regular with locker room access at some shows on the East Coast, which might seem to contradict rumours that he had become disillusioned with wrestling when it came to his attention that some pro wrestling matches were fixed. This period produced some fictional confessional stories (eg. "I Killed a Man in the Ring") that Elwood claimed were based on "a blending of interviews." He abruptly left the job in between late 1972 and early 1973, telling writers the wrestling magazines were too much work for too little compensation.

Elwood was published by four different publishers in the first six years as an SF anthologist. During the following few years he would contract with over a dozen other publishers to produce many dozens of individual books and two anthology series, the four-book Continuum and two-book Frontiers. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction observes that "At one time it was estimated that Roger Elwood alone constituted about one quarter of the total market for SF short stories".

Around the time the SF anthology market was bottoming out, Elwood moved on to Laser Books, an ultimately unsuccessful attempt by romance publishing giant Harlequin Books to systematize and regularize SF into a uniform series of novels by diverse authors. He then effectively left the mainline science fiction/fantasy field in the late 1970s.

Elwood's biography on the Fantastic Fiction website omits all mention of his work in the mainline science fiction/fantasy field and identifies him as a Writer-in-Residence (or occasionally a "professor of literature") at a bible college in the mid-west. The biography also claims that "12 of his novels have won Excellence in Media awards for best book of the year", although the Silver Angels award website includes only a general "Print" category, and does not list Elwood's name .

Criticisms

Elwood's significant presence in the genre anthology field in the mid seventies is not without its detractors, whose criticisms range from professional to ad hominem. Many of them are summarised in senior editor Teresa Nielsen Hayden's original essay on Elwood, which was for some time the basis for this article Cite error: A <ref> tag is missing the closing </ref> (see the help page)..

While declining to accuse Elwood of dishonesty, Nielsen Hayden suggests that:

there are no very creditable explanations for his flood of anthologies in the mid-1970s; that the publishers who bought them would never have done so if they'd had any idea that he was carpet-bombing SF publishing with anthology projects; that many of his anthologies (if not all the stories in them) were well below par in terms of their quality; and that the subsequent collapse of the anthology and story-collection market did long-term damage to science fiction as a whole.

Elwood professed to be as surprised as anyone when the anthology market collapsed — an odd claim, considering he'd been a working anthologist for a decade or more — and lightly departed the SF field to pursue other interests.

Bibliography

Short work

Elwood's Fantastic Fiction biography claims that he has sold "a thousand articles and a few short stories" to publications including Ladies Home Companion, Mike Shayne's Mystery Magazine, Edgar Wallace Mystery Magazine, Photoplay, Grit and Weekly Reader.

Anthologies

Anthology Series

Frontiers:

• Frontiers 1: Tomorrow's Alternatives (1973)
• Frontiers 2: The New Mind (1973)

Continuum:

• Continuum 1 (1974)
• Continuum 2 (1974)
• Continuum 3 (1974)
• Continuum 4 (1975)

Novel Series

Novels

Other

• The Dukes of Hazzard Scrapbook

References

1. Angel Awards website; search for Elwood's name.

See also

• Sam Moskowitz
• Vic Ghidalia
• The book Science Fiction and Market Realities, proceedings of the conference from an Eaton Conference, ed. George Slusser, Gary Westfahl, and Eric S. Rabkin, Athens : University of Georgia Press, c1996, ISBN 0820317268, has one or more essays that discuss the effect of Elwood on the science fiction market in some detail.

External links

• Roger Elwood at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• Bibliography on SciFan
• Excellence In Media awards
• Biography and Bibliography at Fantastic Fiction

• 1933 births
• Living people
• American science fiction writers
• Science fiction editors