Jack Williamson is a true legend among science fiction fans. My favorite story about Jack Williamson concerns his first published story, “The Metal Man,” published in the December 1928 issue of Amazing Stories, when he was just 20 years old. The editor, Hugo Gernsback, was notoriously slow in paying his authors… so slow, in fact, that Williamson discovered he had broken into the magazine when he first laid eyes on the issue in a magazine rack and recognized his hero…

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And so we come to Fritz Leiber, in our continuing exploration of Lester del Rey’s Classic Library of Science Fiction series. The Best of Fritz Leiber, published in 1974, was the second in the line, following The Best of Stanley G. Weinbaum. Unlike Weinbaum and many of the authors who would follow him, Leiber was well known — even a star — to contemporary SF readers in 1974, thanks chiefly to his popular Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser books. Which…

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Cyril M. Kornbluth was one of the best science fiction writers of the 1950s. Like Stanley Weinbaum and Robert E. Howard, he died in his early thirties, leaving behind a handful of stories that would gradually make him famous. Kornbluth was an early member of The Futurians, the legendary group of young science fiction fans that included Donald A. Wollheim, Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl, Robert A. W. Lowndes — and Mary Byers, who eventually became his wife. Kornbluth might be…

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I’ve gotten used to introducing these vintage Best Of collections — as I did recently with The Best of Robert Bloch and The Best of Murray Leinster — assuming that most readers have no idea who the authors are. There’s been a surge of interest in Henry Kuttner lately, however, and he’s been in the news half a dozen times this year at Black Gate alone. The most recent was just last week, when we listed him as one of…

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Robert Bloch — who died in 1994 at the age of 77 — had a lengthy and enviable career as a dark fantasy and horror writer, producing over 30 novels and hundreds of short stories. Of course, all of that was overshadowed by his greatest success: the 1959 novel, Psycho, adapted by legendary director Alfred Hitchcock as perhaps his most famous film. But there’s a lot more to Robert Bloch than just Psycho, as most fans know. Bloch was one of…

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