The Man Who Ruined Science Fiction (part 1)

That title is a gross exaggeration.  Roger Elwood in and of himself did not ruin science fiction, at least not all of it and certainly not permanently, but he did screw up a major hunk of it during the 1970s.

Let his tale be a warning to others.

Born in Atlantic City, NJ in 1943, Elwood seems to have been a primarily East Coast / NYC based writer / editor, conducting most of his business via mail though he did attend out of state conventions.

He began writing professionally soon after graduating high school.  I’ve found no record of him attending college (which I don’t hold against him; neither did I) or of any closely related family.  His earliest appearance in the world of science fiction is an interview with Joseph Stephano regard the then current Outer Limits TV show in Famous Monsters Of Filmland no26 (Oct. 1963).

It speaks volumes about my level of geekdom that I knew exactly which issue it appeared in without checking.

For FM it was an unusual article, one of the very few credited to an outside writer who wasn’t an already established pro giving an opinion of some classic horror film.  Elwood possessed a fair amount of skill as an interviewer, and for a couple of years in the early 1970s edited two wrestling magazines for an out of state publisher (The Big Book of Wrestling and Official Wrestling Guide), until he quit in a pay dispute according to some sources or according to others in dismay at learning wrestling was faked.

I can’t attest to the latter, but I will say it sounds in character for all I’ve learned about him.  Despite his interest in sci-fi and his professional publishing contacts, Elwood displayed a remarkable naivete throughout his career.

I don’t mean that in a positive way.

In the early 1960s he began packaging a series of reprint anthologies for various publishers, sometimes co-editing with Sam Moskowitz, a longtime sci-fi fan turned writer and genre historian, and Vic Ghidalia, an NYC based TV publicist (possibly the connection who arranged the Outer Limits interview?). 

His earliest anthologies appear pretty standard for the genre, collecting some of the better stories from the pulp and early digest era and reprinting them for new readers.

All that changed abruptly in 1967 when Harlan Ellison edited his groundbreaking original anthology, Dangerous Visions.

Dangerous Visions and its 1972 follow-up Again, Dangerous Visions provided a pair of sledgehammer blows that shattered the pulp era-sensibilities of science fiction that still hampered the genre in the 1960s.

They lit the fuse for a decade long controversy in sci-fi fandom called the Old Thing vs. New Wave feud. 

While today many of the stories in both anthologies seemed tainted with sophomoric iconoclasm, at the time they demolished long held publishing taboos in the field, in particular stories that questioned the existence or value of God.

This seems like middle school edgelording today, but at the time appeared absolutely unthinkable.  While the controversy around the two anthologies involved far more than that, in retrospect this couldn’t escape Elwood’s notice.

Just as the anthologies’ phenomenal success not escape it, either.

© Buzz Dixon