Charles Scribner's Sons
Entry updated 16 March 2026. Tagged: Publisher.
US publisher, also known as "Scribner's" and "Scribner", founded in 1846 (for various magazine incarnations from 1870, see Slicks). Their activity in publishing sf as a focused enterprise divides into two periods: 1947-1958, when they published twelve juvenile sf novels by Robert A Heinlein; and circa 1970-1974, when editor Norbert Slepyan moved to Scribner and took with him his plans (announced in 1969 when he was at Harper & Row) to publish high-quality science fiction.
Scribner's immediately began to publish an exceptionally strong sf list, including Robert Silverberg'S Tower of Glass (1970), The Book of Skulls (1972), Dying Inside (1972) and Unfamiliar Territory (coll 1973); R A Lafferty'S Arrive at Easterwine: The Autobiography of a Ktistec Machine (1971), Strange Doings (coll 1972) and Does Anyone Else Have Something Further to Add? (coll 1974); and, most notably, Ursula K Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven (1971) and Gene Wolfe's The Fifth Head of Cerberus (fixup 1972).
When Slepyan returned to Harper & Row circa 1973, he took a number of authors with him, including Le Guin – whose The Dispossessed (1974) had originally been announced by Scribner's – and Gene Wolfe. From that point Scribner's sf line became moribund as such, although they have been Stephen King's main American publisher from 1999 (a relationship not dependent upon genre marking), and although they continued through the end of the decade to reprint titles first published in the UK by Robert Aickman, Christopher Priest and Ian Watson. The publication of sf by such authors a Don DeLillo must be seen as integrated into relationships in which sf as such did not centrally figure. E F Bleiler's reference works, beginning with Science Fiction Writers (anth 1982) – and including later revisions edited by Richard Bleiler such as Science Fiction Writers: Second Edition (anth 1999) – came from a separate division of the firm. [GF]
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