EDWARDS, Malcolm (John)

(1949-)

   UK editor and critic, educated at Cambridge, where he graduated in anthropology. Long active in UK sf FANDOM, he edited the BRITISH SCIENCE FICTION ASSOCIATION journal VECTOR 1972-4, worked as sf editor for GOLLANCZ 1976-7, and was administrator of the SCIENCE FICTION FOUNDATION 1978-80 and editor of its journal FOUNDATION: THE REVIEW OF SCIENCE FICTION \#13-\#19; he was a contributing editor to the first (1979) edition of this encyclopedia. He was one of the two principal members of the board which founded and for some time edited INTERZONE; though he became less active after the fourth issue, he remains an Advisory Editor. Constellations (anth 1980) assembled juvenile sf; Gollancz/Sunday Times SF Competition Stories (anth 1985), which he edited anonymously, assembled the best material from that competition. In the early 1980s he returned to Gollancz, whose sf list he improved and where he rose rapidly in influence, becoming Publishing Director. He left Gollancz in 1989 to join Grafton Books, a division of HarperCollins, of which he remains Publishing Director, Trade Fiction, responsible among other things for the sf/fantasy list. MJE was President of WORLD SF in 1990-1991.In the late 1970s MJE began work, always in collaboration, on the text of a series of books - mostly picture-books - about sf and fantasy. With Robert P. HOLDSTOCK he produced a series of sf and fantasy coffee-table books with fairly brief texts: Alien Landscapes (1979), Tour of the Universe: The Journey of a Lifetime - The Recorded Diaries of Leio Scott and Caroline Luranski (1980), Magician: The Lost Journals of the Magus Geoffrey Carlyle (1982), Realms of Fantasy (1983) and Lost Realms (1985). None of these could be taken very seriously, though the first has interesting artwork. Another collaborative illustrated book was Spacecraft in Fact and Fiction (1979) with Harry HARRISON. MJE's most interesting book, a collaboration with Maxim JAKUBOWSKI and this time not a picture-book, is The Complete Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy Lists (1983; rev vt The SF Book of Lists 1983 US), compiled for the trivia buff and often very funny, but also containing - if the reader can cope with the absence of an index - a great deal of solid information about sf not easily found elsewhere.

   PN

   See also: BRITISH SCIENCE FICTION AWARD; INTERZONE.