ESHBACH, Lloyd Arthur

(1910-)

   US writer and publisher, and an sf enthusiast from an early age. Though his work as a publisher has always - and probably rightly - been deemed his main contribution to the field, a splurge of novels in the 1980s, after he had been inactive as a writer for many years, has focused some attention on his auctorial work. He began publishing sf with "The Man with the Silver Disc" for Scientific Detective in 1930, and for some years wrote fairly prolifically for the PULP MAGAZINES; the best of this early work was assembled in The Tyrant of Time (coll 1955), a volume published by his own FANTASY PRESS, which he had formed in 1946; it was probably the best of the SMALL PRESSES founded after the war to put into book form the novels and stories that had been accumulating in magazines since the founding of AMAZING STORIES in 1926. In 1952 he began a short-lived companion imprint, Polaris Press. For Fantasy Press LAE edited the first published book about modern sf: Of Worlds Beyond: The Science of Science Fiction Writing (anth 1947), a symposium of essays by such authors as John W. CAMPBELL Jr, Robert A. HEINLEIN and A.E. VAN VOGT. Over My Shoulder: Reflections on a Science Fiction Era (1983), told in memoir form, is a history of the sf specialist presses from the 1930s to the 1950s.In the 1980s LAE turned again to fiction. He edited P. Schuyler MILLER's Alice in Wonderland parody, Alicia in Blunderland (1933 Science Fiction Digest as by Nihil; 1983), and he sorted out and completed a manuscript left by his old friend E.E. "Doc" SMITH, publishing it as Subspace Encounter (1983) by Smith, ed LAE. His major work of the decade, the Gates of Lucifer sequence - The Land Beyond the Gate (1984), The Armlet of the Gods (1986), The Sorceress of Scath (1988) and The Scroll of Lucifer (1990) - does not forge its way into new territory, though the facility which LAE displays in putting his protagonist through various paces in various mythic venues is notable in an author so long inactive. Like Jack WILLIAMSON's, his career has extended throughout almost the entire history of the modern GENRE SF, which he continues to grace in his supporting role.

   JC/MJE

   See also: CYBORGS; LONGEVITY (IN WRITERS AND PUBLICATIONS); SPECULATIVE FICTION.