Davin, Eric Leif
Entry updated 1 July 2026. Tagged: Author, Critic.
(1947- ) US historian (taking his MA and PHd in history at the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), author specializing in labour history and popular culture, and critic. He began to publish genre fiction with "The Rending" with Camille Leon in Space and Time for January 1981, but is of greatest sf interest for two valuable book-length critical studies of early Genre SF creators. Pioneers of Wonder: Conversations with the Founders of Science Fiction (coll 1999) comprises essays on Hugo Gernsback and others, plus Interviews with still-available "founders" and those who remembered them: Gernsback, for example, is discussed in conversations with Charles D Hornig and David Lasser, while Stanley G Weinbaum is represented by his widow Margaret Weinbaum Kay. Further interviewees are Lloyd Arthur Eshbach, Raymond Z Gallun, Frank K Kelly, Curt Siodmak and R F Starzl; there are also essays on early sf Cinema and Sam Moskowitz's pioneer achievements in Critical and Historical Works About SF. Partners in Wonder: Women and the Birth of Science Fiction 1926-1965 (2006), dedicated to "the 203 'Known' Women Who Published in US Science Fiction Magazines, 1926-1960", explores the works of a great many early Women SF Writers, with biographical and bibliographical notes, and has an appendix of numerous tables chronicling their appearances (as well as those of "Writers of Unknown Gender") in the US and UK magazines, as film screenwriters, and so forth.
Davin was a contributor to Fantasy Commentator and helped assemble its final issue #59/60 (Spring 2011). He has more recently published the Anne Bonny sequence of historical pirate fantasies, comprising The Desperate and the Dead (2014), which also features demons (see Gods and Demons) and Zombies, and The Scarlet Queen (2016), which adds Vampires to the mix. [DRL]
Eric Leif Davin
born Dyersburg, Tennessee: 19 December 1947
works
series
Anne Bonny
- The Desperate and the Dead (Santa Rosa, California: Damnation Books, 2014) [Anne Bonny: pb/]
- The Scarlet Queen (Santa Rosa, California: Eternal Press, 2016) [Anne Bonny: pb/]
nonfiction
- Pioneers of Wonder: Conversations with the Founders of Science Fiction (New York: Prometheus Books, 1999) [nonfiction: coll: foreword by Jack Williamson: hb/Michael Carroll]
- Partners in Wonder: Women and the Birth of Science Fiction 1926-1965 (Lanham, Maryland: Rowan and Littlefield Publishers/Lexington Books, 2006) [nonfiction: includes biographical notices and bibliographies: pb/Jeffrey W Talley]
links
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