Lloyd Arthur Eshbach

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Wonder Stories , July 1932

Lloyd Arthur Eshbach (born June 20, 1910 in Palm , Pennsylvania , † October 23, 2003 in Myerstown , Pennsylvania) was an American science fiction publisher, editor and author.

Life

Eshbach was born the fifth of six children to Katheryn and Oswin Eshbach. He grew up in Reading , Pennsylvania. In 1926, at the age of 15, he left school to work and discovered the first edition of Amazing Stories in the local bookshop . Science fiction captivated him from then on.

He began to write fan mail, soon wrote his own stories and in 1928 he managed to sell the short story The Voice from the Ether to Amazing , although it was published in 1931. In the following years he published more stories, was co-editor of William L. Crawford's short-lived SF magazine Marvel Tales in 1934/1935 and at the same time founded his own magazine, The Galleon , for which he asked HP Lovecraft for contributions, who gave him a short story and sent two poems.

As a member of the First Fandom , he took an active part in the developing science fiction subculture. In 1939 he attended the first Worldcon and continued to take part in many different conventions for decades . He was guest of honor at the Worldcon 1949 and the World Fantasy Convention 1995.

After the Second World War, the heyday of pulp magazines drew to a close, and science fiction novels began to appear as books, which gave Eshbach the idea of ​​becoming a publisher himself. He founded Fantasy Press , one of the first book publishers specializing in science fiction. From 1947, works by EE Smith , Jack Williamson , Robert A. Heinlein , John W. Campbell , Lyon Sprague de Camp , AE van Vogt and others appeared here, some of them works that had previously appeared in magazines and were now hardly tangible, such as van Vogt's The Book of Ptath . Above all, however, the volumes of the Lensmen cycle, EE Smith's classic space opera , appeared here in the first edition or in a revised version.

One of the first books published by Fantasy Press was 1947 Of Worlds Beyond , which is considered the first secondary work in science fiction. In seven essays, Robert A. Heinlein, Eric Temple Bell , Jack Williamson, AE van Vogt, Edward E. Smith, Lyon Sprague de Camp and John W. Campbell gave tips and inside information for budding SF authors and provided the reader with insightful insights into the How SF publishers and magazines work.

Another special feature of Fantasy Press publications was that many titles appeared in a numbered and signed special edition. In 1952 Eshbach founded Polaris Press as the imprint of Fantasy Press , but only one title each appeared there in 1952 and 1953. In 1958 Eshbach sold Fantasy Press' inventory to publisher Donald M. Grant. By then he had published almost 60 titles, including some SF and Fantasy classics.

Eshbach describes his memories of his time as a publisher, his contacts with other SF small publishers from the very beginning such as Gnome , Shasta , Grant , Prime , FPCI , Arkham House and the world of early fandom in his 1982 memoir Over My Shoulder: Reflections on a science fiction era . In this autobiography he also quotes L. Ron Hubbard , still a middle-ranking science fiction writer in 1949 and later founder of the Church of Scientology, with the words: “I would like to found a religion. There's money in there. "

The term speculative fiction is said to go back to Eshbach. In an attempt to separate the emerging new genre into science fiction and fantasy , Heinlein and Eshbach made the suggestion to designate the latter as speculative fiction . This would not have changed anything about the abbreviation SF , which could have been used to designate both areas. But this proposal did not prevail.

From 1958 to 1962 Eshbach was a publisher of church literature and from 1962 until his retirement in 1975 he worked as a salesman for the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago . After his retirement he became a pastor in the Evangelical Congregational Denomination and worked in the congregations of the Mount Culmen Evangelical Congregational Church near Bowmansville , the First Evangelical Congregational in Reading and the Trinity Evangelical Congregational Church in Womelsdorf .

Most of his texts had appeared in the 1930s, after which he only published a few isolated short stories, but after his retirement he became active again as a writer and wrote the tetralogy Lucifer's Gates in the 1980s , the last volume of which, Scroll Of Lucifer, came out in 1990.

When Eshbach died on October 23, 2003 at the age of 93, he left behind a son, five grandchildren and ten great-grandchildren.

Awards

bibliography

Lucifer's Gates (novel series)
  • The Land Beyond The Gate (1984)
  • The Armlet Of The Gods (1986)
  • The Sorceress Of Scath (1988)
  • The Scroll Of Lucifer (1990)
Novels
Collections
  • Tyrant of Time (1955)
Short stories
  • The Man with the Silver Disc (1930)
  • The Invisible Destroyer (1930)
  • The Gray Plague (1930)
  • The Valley of Titans (1931)
  • A Voice from the Ether (1931)
  • The Light from Infinity (1932)
  • The Time Conqueror (1932, also as The Tyrant of Time )
  • The Beast Men (1933)
  • On Board the Space Ship Terra (1934)
  • The Man with the Hour Glass (1934)
  • The Brain of Ali Kahn (1934)
  • The Elfin Lights (1935)
  • The Kingdom of Thought (1935)
  • The Meteor Miners (1935)
  • Isle of the Undead (1936)
  • The Outpost on Ceres (1936)
  • The Scroll of Valoki (1938)
  • Out of the Past (1938)
  • The Place of Orchids (1939, also called The God That Science Made )
  • Mutineers of Space (1939)
    • German: Avengers of Jupiter . Pabel (Utopia # 97), 1957.
  • Dust (1939)
  • Three Wise Men (1939)
  • Singing Blades (1940)
  • The Cauldron (1940, also as The Cauldron of Life )
  • The Shadows from Hesplon (1940)
  • The Hyper Sense (1941)
  • God of Light (1944, also as The Light from Beyond )
  • Out of the Sun (1948)
  • Overlord of Earth (1950)
  • Spaceways Incident (1955)
  • The City of Dread (1955)
  • The Fuzzies (1957)
  • Sister Abigail's Collection (1988)
  • Wodan's Army (1989)
Non-fiction
  • Of Worlds Beyond: The Science of Science Fiction Writing (as editor, 1947)
  • Over My Shoulder: Reflections on a Science Fiction Era (1983)

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Marvel Tales in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
  2. ^ ST Joshi , David E. Schultz: To HP Lovecraft Encyclopedia. Greenwood 2001, ISBN 0-313-31578-7 , p. 87.
  3. ↑ John Clute: Fantasy Press. In: John Clute, Peter Nicholls: The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. 3rd edition (online edition), version dated December 20, 2011. See also Fantasy Press and Polaris Press in the ISFDB .
  4. ↑ I'd like to start a religion. That's where the money is.
personal data
SURNAME Eshbach, Lloyd Arthur
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Drake, Anders W. (pseudonym); Eschbach, Lloyd Arthur (alternative spelling)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American SF writer and editor
DATE OF BIRTH June 20, 1910
PLACE OF BIRTH Palm , Pennsylvania
DATE OF DEATH October 23, 2003
Place of death Myerstown , Pennsylvania