Roger Elwood (January 13, 1943 – February 2, 2007) was an American science fiction writer and editor, who edited a large number of anthologies and collections for a variety of publishers in the early 1970s. Biography Born and raised in Southern New Jersey, Roger Elwood started his professional writing career shortly after graduating from high school. Elwood edited two wrestling magazines, The Big Book of Wrestling and Official Wrestling Guide, on a contract basis in 1971–72 for Jalart House, an Arizona publisher, and regularly photographed matches (wrestling magazines placed a premium on photos rather than text). He became a regular with locker room access at some shows on the East Coast, which might seem to contradict rumours that he had become disillusioned with wrestling when it came to his attention that some pro wrestling matches were fixed. This period produced some fictional confessional stories (e.g. "I Killed a Man in the Ring") that Elwood claimed were based on "a blending of interviews". He abruptly left the job in between late 1972 and early 1973, telling writers the wrestling magazines were too much work for too little compensation. Elwood was published by four different publishers in the first six years as an SF anthologist. During the following few years he would contract with over a dozen other publishers to produce many dozens of individual books and two anthology series, the four-book Continuum and two-book Frontiers. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction observes that "At one time it was estimated that Roger Elwood alone constituted about one quarter of the total market for SF short stories." Around the time the SF anthology market was bottoming out, Elwood moved on to Laser Books, an ultimately unsuccessful attempt by romance publishing giant Harlequin Books to systematize and regularize SF into a uniform series of novels by diverse authors. He then effectively left the mainline science fiction/fantasy field in the late 1970s. Elwood's biography on the Fantastic Fiction website omits all mention of his work in the mainline science fiction/fantasy field and identifies him as a Writer-in-Residence (or occasionally a "professor of literature") at a Bible college in the mid-west. The biography also claims that "12 of his novels have won Excellence in Media awards for best book of the year", although the Silver Angels award website includes only a general "Print" category, and does not list Elwood's name.[1] In the 1990s, Elwood became a prolific writer of Christian-based novels, with more than thirty novels published throughout that decade. Criticisms Elwood's significant presence in the genre anthology field in the mid 1970s is not without its detractors, whose criticisms range from professional to ad hominem; James Nicoll has noted that Elwood's "capacity to produce anthologies at high speed was not, alas, matched with an ability to produce interesting anthologies", as well as the possibility that "readers, having read a few unremarkable Elwood anthologies, were reluctant to buy more".[2] A review of Elwood's 1976 anthology Six Science Fiction Plays in the Star Trek fan magazine Enterprise Incidents remarked that except for the inclusion of the original teleplay of the episode "The City on the Edge of Forever" by Harlan Ellison, the book was "another excursion into mediocrity by Roger Elwood".