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Anonymous SF Editors

Entry updated 15 January 2024. Tagged: Editor, Theme.

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This entry, as a companion to Anonymous (dealing with never-identified authors), notes uncredited and never-identified Anthology editors who owing to their anonymity can be referred to only by citing their productions. Anonymously edited sf Anthologies are not particularly common, unlike the case with ghost and horror stories. We do not treat pairs of novellas or novels bound in Dos-à-Dos format (in the larger sense discussed in that entry) as anthologies.

Where their names have been identified, anonymous editors are generally listed in their own entries and/or, if another person receives editorial credit, the entry for that person. Thus Earl Kemp is the actual anonymous editor of The Science Fiction Novel: Imaginative and Social Criticism (anth 1959), for which Basil Davenport (who wrote the introduction) is erroneously given credit: this point is recorded in both their entries. Martin H Greenberg (whom see) worked anonymously on many anthologies for which only co-editors or "guest stars" received editorial credit. Celebrities may be provided with a ghost editor: Orson Welles's Invasion from Mars: Interplanetary Stories (anth 1949) was edited thus by Don Ward for Dell Books, and a variety of editorial ghosts not only compiled the extensive sequence of anthologies bylined Alfred Hitchcock but often wrote introductions in his name.

Sf anthologies with never-identified anonymous editors are now rare, although there are several early examples. The single most important such anthology is Sometime, Never (anth 1956), referenced several times throughout this encyclopedia, whose three novella-length contributions are William Golding's "Envoy Extraordinary", Mervyn Peake's "Boy in Darkness" and John Wyndham's "Consider Her Ways". Observer and Gollancz/Sunday Times newspaper sf competitions have generated anonymous anthologies of winners and runners-up [see Checklist below]. Although, as noted above, this encyclopedia does not normally treat two-book dos volumes as anthologies, the quasi-Belmont Double A Pair from Space (anth 1965 dos) below is exceptional in having an overall title. Anonymously edited volumes of contributions to the Shared World of The Web are listed under that heading. [DRL]

see also: Omnibuses.

anonymously edited works (highly selected; under construction)

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