Pierce, John J
Entry updated 9 November 2026. Tagged: Author, Critic, Fan.
(1941-2026) US editor and critic, son of John R Pierce, with a background in Fandom, editor of a Fanzine, Renaissance, in the 1960s, and at that time author of reasoned polemical articles about the damage he saw being wrought on sf by writers of the New Wave. Pierce edited Galaxy November 1977-March/April 1979, years in which through no special fault of his the magazine was rapidly declining. His account of this period was titled "Thirteen Months of Torment" (April 2007 New York Review of Science Fiction).
From the later 1980s Pierce published an ambitious sequence of critical books about sf, A Study in Imagination and Evolution, which together form a kind of History of SF: Foundations of Science Fiction: A Study in Imagination and Evolution (1987), which deals mostly with Proto SF, Great Themes of Science Fiction: A Study in Imagination and Evolution (1987), When World Views Collide: A Study in Imagination and Evolution (1989) and Odd Genre: A Study in Imagination and Evolution (1994). These may deserve more discussion than they appear to have received. Pierce's prose is accessible and the books are well organized, but their ideology is deeply conservative in the sense that he views non-Genre SF as effectively not sf at all, though his focus – here and elsewhere – on writers like Lois McMaster Bujold, Kim Stanley Robinson, Cordwainer Smith (for whose Instrumentality of Mankind sequence he constructed a much-reprinted timeline) and Robert Charles Wilson demonstrates the intelligence behind the sequence's strong bias toward Hard SF; his advocacy of the different ways in which sf has invented the future is intelligent and measured. Much of the analysis is thematic, some philosophical; his view of the evolution of sf incorporates a sometimes explicit assumption of progress: as a tree with evolving branches.
In the new century the author planned to rework this entire critical sequence, with the first revised volume Imagination and Evolution: A Truer History of SF (2026) taking the history to the early 1930s. [PN/JC/DRL]
see also: Greenwood Press.
John Jeremy Pierce
born New York: 3 November 1941
died 1 November 2026
works
nonfiction
series
A Study in Imagination and Evolution
- Foundations of Science Fiction: A Study in Imagination and Evolution (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1987) [nonfiction: A Study in Imagination and Evolution: hb/nonpictorial]
- Great Themes of Science Fiction: A Study in Imagination and Evolution (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1987) [nonfiction: A Study in Imagination and Evolution: hb/nonpictorial]
- When World Views Collide: A Study in Imagination and Evolution (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1989) [nonfiction: A Study in Imagination and Evolution: hb/nonpictorial]
- Odd Genre: A Study in Imagination and Evolution (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1994) [nonfiction: A Study in Imagination and Evolution: hb/nonpictorial]
individual titles
- Imagination and Evolution: A Truer History of SF (Encino, California: Black Coat Press, 2026) [nonfiction: pb/Jean-Félix Lyon]
single-author collections as editor
- The Best of Cordwainer Smith (Garden City, New York: Nelson Doubleday, 1975) [coll: includes timeline by Pierce, revised for later reissues including vt below: Instrumentality of Mankind: pb/Janice C Tate]
- The Rediscovery of Man (London: Victor Gollancz, 1988) [coll: vt of the above: Instrumentality of Mankind: hb/John Avon]
- The Best of Raymond Z. Gallun (New York: Ballantine Books/Del Rey, 1978) [coll: pb/H R van Dongen]
- The Best of Murray Leinster (New York: Ballantine Books/Del Rey, 1978) [coll: pb/H R van Dongen]
links
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