BENSEN, Donald Roynald

(1927-)

   US editor and author, his novels being usually pseudonymous. The two anthologies he has edited, The Unknown (anth 1963) and The Unknown Five (anth 1964), are both fantasy and (all but one story) compiled from UNKNOWN. He was more important within the sf field for his editorship of Pyramid Books 1957-67, a period during which that firm became a significant producer of sf novels in reprint and original forms. In 1968 he became executive editor of Berkley Books. He moved to Dial Press in 1975, directing their Quantum sf programme, and he has also acted as consulting editor for Dell Books's sf since 1977. He wrote, in And Having Writ . . . (1978), a smoothly humorous sf novel set in an ALTERNATE WORLD engendered by the survival of the ALIENS whose crash-landing caused the Siberian Tunguska explosion of 1908. Thomas Alva Edison and H.G. WELLS make appearances.

   JC

   See also: HISTORY IN SF.