Roger Elwood

Roger Elwood (born 1933) is an American science fiction writer and editor. He has written assorted short stories and novels over the last 30 years, but is best known for the bizarre episode in which he flooded the SF market in 1972-1975 with carelessly edited theme anthologies.

Prior to that time, anthologies and collections were very popular with readers, and were considered by the publishing industry to be a surer bet than novels. Roger Elwood ended that, single-handedly breaking the story collection/anthology market. It has never wholly recovered. He squandered industry credibility accumulated over decades by better anthologists, and wrecked the readers' faith in collections.

To this day, anthologies and story collections remain a hard sell. That's made life harder for short-fiction writers, who lost their second-rights sales, and damaged the readers' relationship with short fiction. It's been a real loss. Short fiction was always the genre's R&D lab.

Number of anthologies edited by Roger Elwood, by year of publication:

• 1964: 1
• 1965: 1
• 1966: 1
• 1967: 1
• 1968: 1
• 1969: 3
• 1970: 1
• 1971: 0
• 1972: 4
• 1973: 17
• 1974: 22
• 1975: 8
• 1976: 3
• 1977: 1
• 1978: 0

How it happened: In the book industry, there's usually a substantial gap between a book's contract date and its publication date. Elwood's mid-70s tidal wave of anthologies were contracted for c. 1970-1972. With the exception of a couple of series, the contracts were modest one- or two-book deals, which he spread out over more than two dozen publishing houses. This made it impossible for the publishers to know what was afoot until the books started coming out.

Houses which published Roger Elwood's anthologies:

• 1964: Paperback Library
• 1965: Paperback Library
• 1966: Holt, Rinehart & Winston
• 1967: Tower
• 1968: Tower
• 1969: MacFadden-Bartell (3x)
• 1970: MacFadden-Bartell
• 1971: ---
• 1972: Avon, Chilton, Fleming H. Revell, MacFadden-Bartell
• 1973: Avon (2x), Concordia, Doubleday, Fawcett Gold Medal, Follett, Franklin Watts, Harper & Row, Macmillan (2x), Manor, Rand McNally (2x), Random House, Trident, Walker, Whitman
• 1974: Aurora, Berkley/Putnam (3x), Curtis, Dodd Mead, Doubleday, Franklin Watts, John Knox Press, Julian Messner, Lerner SF Library (8x), Pocket, Rand McNally, Thomas Nelson, Trident
• 1975: Berkley, Berkley/Putnam, Bobbs-Merrill, Evans, Follett, Manor, Prentice-Hall, Warner
• 1976: Archway, Pocket, Washington Square Press
• 1977: Bobbs-Merrill

One ought not assume that books published in 1974-1977 were contracted for later than titles published in 1972-1973. Anthology sales had tanked long before the books stopped coming out.

There was no way the 1970s SF market could assimilate that many low-grade anthologies. By the time Roger Elwood was finished, you couldn't have sold an SF anthology into the North American market if it were priced at ten cents and made out of Godiva chocolate. 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.

Other criticisms of Elwood are more conjectural, but not easily dismissed. The biggest area of criticism has been the quality of the books themselves. It must be noted that some of Elwood's collections were quite decent, and that all of them featured some good writers and good stories. However, some of his projects--including ones that by all indications should have had generous budgets--were peculiarly long on authors who had slight or nonexistent publishing credentials outside of Roger Elwood projects.

This aroused suspicion for two reasons. One was that in the mid-1970s, there was absolutely no shortage of good short fiction writers. The other reason is the way anthologists are paid for their projects. Under the usual setup, the entire advance is paid out to the anthologist, who then purchases story rights out of his or her own pocket. Any unspent advance money stays in the anthologist's pocket. (This writer does not assert that there was any financial hanky-panky going on, merely noting the circumstances under which certain criticisms arose.)

For example, one of these projects was Elwood's "Lerner SF Library," published in 1974. It was an eight-volume uniform-format hardcover YA series featuring original stories, three or four per volume, which were commissioned specifically for the project. The financial details aren't known, but SF hardcovers were relatively uncommon in the 1970s; so between that and the fact that the stories were all original commissions, it's not unreasonable to assume that it was a well-funded project. In those eight volumes are published three authors whose only recorded sale, according to the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, was to that book; two more authors who only ever sold stories to Roger Elwood; and one whose only first sale was to Roger Elwood, but who had the story picked up for republication elsewhere.

Editorially speaking, that's neither good nor probable. A magazine editor might buy an existing story from a previously unpublished author, but a good story speaks for itself. However, an editor who's commissioning stories on a set theme for a premium project doesn't normally buy work from writers who have no track record. Editors know better than anyone else how many people there are who think they can write, and how few of them are justified in holding that opinion.

The Lerner SF Library also contained two stories by Eando Binder, and a third story by Otto Binder. That was very odd indeed. Earl and Otto (= Eando) Binder wrote reasonably lively pulp in their day, but even in their day their work was never terribly good, and by modern standards... it's not up to modern standards. Moreover, Earl Binder quit co-authoring stories with his brother in 1955, and died in 1965. Otto Binder died in 1975. It's hard to imagine a scenario that accounts for the two of them suddenly starting to write brand-new stories for Roger Elwood's 1974 anthology series.

Was Roger Elwood dishonest? Nothing can be proved, certainly not at this late date. What's safe to say is 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.

Around the time the SF anthology market was bottoming out, Elwood moved on to Laser Books, an attempt by romance publishing giant Harlequin Books to systematize and regularize SF into a uniform series of novels by diverse authors. It didn't work. The subject deserves treatment in greater depth.

Elwood effectively left the mainline science fiction/fantasy field in the late 1970s. Word in the SF community was that he'd moved on to edit wrestling magazines, but had become disillusioned with them when it came to his attention that some pro wrestling matches were fixed.

Elwood later recycled his familiarity with the SF/fantasy genre to write such curious novels as Sorcerors Of Sodom and Nightmare At Skull Junction for the "Christian fiction" market, as well as The Dukes Of Hazzard Scrapbook and Ashes Of Paradise (which explains how to reconcile Confederate slaveholding and Christian ideals). His greatest recent success seems to be the Angelwalk property, where a handful of novels about Jesus' guardian angel are recycled and repackaged into nearly two dozen editions.

Elwood's official author's biography now omits all mention of his work in the mainline science/fiction fantasy field and identifies him as a professor of literature at a "bible college." He also claims that "12 of his novels have won Excellence in Media awards for best book of the year," a curious exaggeration for so Christian a fellow, since Excellence in Media, according to its website, does not even give an award for best book of the year.

A complete biography of Roger Elwood may never be written, but it would be interesting to see someone try.

External links

• Template:Isfdb name
• Bibliography (http://scifan.com/writers/ee/ElwoodRoger.asp) on SciFan
• Excellence In Media awards (http://www.angelawards.com)