Groff Conklin - Science Fiction

Science Fiction

Conklin didn't grow up a reader of science fiction, but came to it later in life. In his Galaxy Five-Star Shelf column of December, 1954, he states, "...I actually did not become an earnest devotee of the form until 1944, about a year before the Atomic Age actually opened....The first item I remember reading that could be classified as science fiction was H. G. Wells' Men Like Gods, back in 1924 when I was a college sophomore. It had a tremendous effect on me...." A roommate from 1930 provided him with "bound volumes of tear-sheets of early weirds, fantastics and 'scientifictions' from the old Argosy, All-Story and others...." He sent a proposal for his first science fiction anthology to Crown Publishers in 1944, and the book was issued in 1946, several months ahead of the other great sf anthology of that year, Adventures in Time and Space edited by Raymond J. Healy and J. Francis McComas.

After his first science fiction anthology, The Best of Science Fiction (1946), weighing in at 785 pages, he followed with A Treasury of Science Fiction (1946). Readers soon began to seek out books with his strikingly unusual and exotic name on the cover—The Science Fiction Galaxy (1950), The Big Book of Science Fiction (1950) and Possible Worlds of Science Fiction (1951). The prominent display of Conklin's huge hardcover anthologies in the "New Titles" section of libraries led many readers to discover science fiction during the genre's early 1950s boom. In the Grip of Terror (Permabooks, 1951) was an offbeat collection of horror tales, and he collaborated with Lucy Conklin on The Supernatural Reader in 1953, a year before her death. Four years later, he married Florence Alexander Wohlken.

His book review column, "Galaxy's Five-Star Shelf", was a key feature in Galaxy Science Fiction from its premiere issue (October 1950) until October 1955. During that period, he also edited Grosset & Dunlap's Science Fiction Classics series, which he conceived as an inexpensive alternative to hard-to-find small-press editions of such titles as Robert A. Heinlein's Beyond This Horizon and Isaac Asimov's I, Robot, although the first title in the series (Henry Kuttner's Fury) was that story's first book publication.

The Weather-Conditioned House (1958) is not science fiction but a practical discussion of methods involved in weather-conditioning a house. The book was authoritative enough that it was reissued with an update in 1982.

In the last three years of his life, Conklin was the staff science editor for The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. He lived in New York at 150 West 96th Street. At the age of 63, he died of emphysema in his summer home at Pawling, New York.

A major survey of Conklin's contribution to science fiction is Bud Webster's 41 Above the Rest: An Index and Checklist for the Anthologies of Groff Conklin. Webster's study prompted this comment from Barry Malzberg:

Groff Conklin was the most important science fiction anthologist through the years of the genre's true second generation, that point at which its previously magazine-bound masterpieces were being systematically located, aligned and placed into permanent format. His contribution over the period of two decades was irreplaceable and all of our postwar history exists in the penumbra of his work. Bud Webster has in this index granted an act of scholarship and homage of equal irreplaceability.