Lester del Rey

Lester del Rey (1915–1993) was a man of multiple talents, a writer not just of SF and fantasy but of many other forms of more mundane fiction, as well as many nonfiction books. He was editor of many SF magazines, from the early 1950s to the late 1960s, an authors’ agent, a book reviewer, and probably most influentially, an editor, with his wife, Judy-Lynn del Rey, at Del Rey books for over two decades. (Incidentally, Del Rey Books, one of the strongest SF lines in the late twentieth century, was named for the lady, not Lester.)

In person, he was a superb, if controversial, speaker, an energetic debater, and if he didn’t have the entire history of SF and fantasy stored in his head, anything left out was probably unimportant.

Lester del Rey was diminutive in physical stature, but a titan in his influence on SF and fantasy or, to put it another way, a master of the genre—and the Science Fiction Writers of America made it official, awarding him the Grand Master Award for a lifetime of distinguished service to the field, an obvious and inevitable honor.