The Science Fiction Roll of Honor
Kings Who Die - novelette by Poul Anderson
The Last Question - short story by Isaac Asimov
How Beautiful with Banners - short story by James Blish
Daybroke - short story by Robert Bloch
Who Goes There? - novella by John W. Campbell, Jr. [as by John W. Campbell]
Dog Star - short story by Arthur C. Clarke
The Monster - short story by Lester del Rey
Dust - short story by Lloyd Arthur Eshbach
The Prophets of Doom - essay by Hugo Gernsback
The Long Watch - short story by Robert A. Heinlein
Sanity - short story by Fritz Leiber
The Meaning of the Word "Impossible" - essay by Willy Ley
SF, the Spirit of Youth - essay by Frank R. Paul
From The Skylark of Space (excerpt) - short fiction by Edward E. Smith
The Hurkle Is a Happy Beast - short story by Theodore Sturgeon
Abdication - novelette by E. Mayne Hull and A. E. van Vogt
American Science fiction, Science fiction, History and criticism, Science fiction, history and criticism
Frederik Pohl, Poul Anderson, Isaac Asimov, James Blish, Robert Bloch, John W. Campbell, Arthur C. Clarke, Lester del Rey, Lloyd Arthur Eshbach, Hugo Gernsback, Robert A. Heinlein, Fritz Leiber, Willy Ley, Frank R. Paul, E. E. Smith, Theodore Sturgeon, A. E. van Vogt, E. Mayne Hull
Frederik Pohl, Jr. was born in Brooklyn, New York.  His father held a number of jobs, and his family moved many times in his childhood before settling in Brooklyn when he was about seven.  He attended Brooklyn Tech high school, but dropped out and took a job to help support his family.  As a teen, he founded the New York science fiction writer's group The Futurians.  His first publication, a poem, appeared in Amazing Stories in 1937, when he was 18 years old.  In 1936, he joined the Young Communist League and became President of the Brooklyn branch, but he left it in 1939 after Stalin-Hitler pact.  In 1939, at the age of 21, he was editor of both Super Science Stories and Astonishing Stories, and regularly published his own stories in both of them.  He married his first wife in 1940.  In 1943 both the magazines he was editing folded, and he worked as a literary agent.  During World War II, he served with the Army Air Corps from 1945-1945.  He divorced his first wife during this period and married his second wife in 1945.  In 1948 he married his third wife, Judith Merril, who he divorced in 1953, the same year he married his fourth wife, Carol Metcal Ulf.

In the early 1950s his literary agency business failed and he returned to editing as an assistant editor at Galaxy Science Fiction and later also if Magazine.  In 1966, 1967, and 1968 his magazines won Hugo Awards for Best Professional Magazines.  In the 1970s he acquired and edited novels for the "Frederik Pohl Selections" series of Bantam Books.  He also began to emerge as a novel writer, and went on to win Nebula awards for fiction in 1976 and 1977 and the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1978.  He married his current wife, science fiction editor and academic Elizabeth Anne Hull, PhD, in 1984.  He continues to write from his home in Palatine, Illinois. || Poul William Anderson was an American science fiction author who began his career during one of the Golden Ages of the genre and continued to write and remain popular into the 21st century. Anderson also authored several works of fantasy, historical novels, and a prodigious number of short stories. He received numerous awards for his writing, including seven Hugo Awards and three Nebula Awards.

Anderson received a degree in physics from the University of Minnesota in 1948. He married Karen Kruse in 1953. They had one daughter, Astrid, who is married to science fiction author Greg Bear. Anderson was the sixth President of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, taking office in 1972. He was a member of the Swordsmen and Sorcerers' Guild of America, a loose-knit group of Heroic Fantasy authors founded in the 1960s, some of whose works were anthologized in Lin Carter's Flashing Swords! anthologies. He was a founding member of the Society for Creative Anachronism. Robert A. Heinlein dedicated his 1985 novel The Cat Who Walks Through Walls to Anderson and eight of the other members of the Citizens' Advisory Council on National Space Policy.

Poul Anderson died of cancer on July 31, 2001, after a month in the hospital. Several of his novels were published posthumously.

Source: Goodreads || Asimov was born sometime between October 4, 1919 and January 2, 1920 in Petrovichi in Smolensk Oblast, RSFSR (now Russia), the son of a Jewish family of millers.  Although his exact date of birth is uncertain, Asimov himself celebrated it on January 2.  His family emigrated to Brooklyn, New York and opened a candy store when he was three years old.  He taught himself to read at the age of five. He began reading the science fiction pulp magazines that his family's store carried. Around the age of eleven, he began to write his own stories, and by age nineteen, he was selling them to the science fiction magazines. He graduated from Columbia University in 1939. He married Gertrude Blugerman in 1942.  During World War II he worked as a civilian at the Philadelphia Navy Yard's Naval Air Experimental Station.  After the war, he returned to Columbia University and earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry in 1948.  He then joined the faculty of the Boston University School of Medicine until 1958, when he became a full-time writer. His first novel, [Pebble in the Sky](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL46402W), was published in 1950. He and his wife divorced in 1973, and he married Janet O. Jeppson the same year. He was a highly prolific writer, having written or edited more than 500 books and an estimated 9,000 letters and postcards. || Blish trained as a biologist at Rutgers and Columbia University, and spent 1942–1944 as a medical technician in the U.S. Army. After the war he became the science editor for the Pfizer Pharmaceutical Company. His first published story appeared in 1940, and his writing career progressed until he gave up his job to become a professional writer. He married literary agent Virginia Kidd in 1947. He worked for the Tobacco Institute from 1962-1968.  In 1968, he emigrated to England. Between 1967 and his death in 1975, he became the first author to write short story collections based on the TV series Star Trek. In total, he wrote 11 volumes of short stories adapted from episodes of the series, as well as an original novel, Spock Must Die! in 1970. He died midway through writing Star Trek 12; his second wife, J. A. Lawrence, completed the book, and later completed the adaptations in the volume Mudd's Angels. || Robert Albert Bloch was born in Chicago, Illinois, the son of German-Jewish Americans.  During the 1930s, he was an avid reader of Weird Tales magazine and H. P. Lovecraft in particular.  He wrote to Lovecraft, who responded with advice on writing, and Bloch sold his first published short story, "The Feast in the Abbey" to Weird Tales when he was just seventeen.  He continued to write for Weird Tales and went on to become one of its most popular authors, while also contributing to other magazines.  In 1946, his first published novel, The Scarf, was released.  He received the Hugo Award for Best Short Story in 1959 for “That Hell-Bound Train” (1958).  Also in 1959, he published one of his best-known novels, Psycho, which was adapted for the screen in 1960 by Joseph Stefano, directed by Alfred Hitchcock.  He wrote the screenplay for the movie The Night Walker (1964), and he also wrote three scripts for the television show Star Trek.  Over the course of his career, he wrote hundreds of short stories and over twenty novels, mostly in the crime fiction, science fiction and, horror fiction genres. || John Wood Campbell Jr. was an American science fiction writer and editor. As editor of Astounding Science Fiction from late 1937 until his death, he is generally credited with shaping the Golden Age of Science Fiction. Isaac Asimov called Campbell "the most powerful force in science fiction ever, and for the first ten years of his editorship he dominated the field completely."

As a writer, Campbell published super-science space opera under his own name and moody stories under his primary and most famous pseudonym, Don A. Stuart. Campbell also wrote under the pen names Karl Van Kampen and Arthur McCann.
- Wikipedia || Sir Arthur Charles Clarke CBE FRAS was a British science fiction writer, science writer and futurist, inventor, undersea explorer, and television series host.

He is famous for being co-writer of the screenplay for the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, widely considered to be one of the most influential films of all time. Clarke was a science writer, who was both an avid populariser of space travel and a futurist of uncanny ability. On these subjects he wrote over a dozen books and many essays, which appeared in various popular magazines. In 1961 he was awarded the Kalinga Prize, an award which is given by UNESCO for popularising science. These along with his science fiction writings eventually earned him the moniker "Prophet of the Space Age". His other science fiction writings earned him a number of Hugo and Nebula awards, which along with a large readership made him one of the towering figures of science fiction. For many years Clarke, Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov were known as the "Big Three" of science fiction.

Clarke was a lifelong proponent of space travel. In 1934, while still a teenager, he joined the British Interplanetary Society. In 1945, he proposed a satellite communication system using geostationary orbits. He was the chairman of the British Interplanetary Society from 1946–1947 and again in 1951–1953.

Clarke emigrated from England to Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon) in 1956, largely to pursue his interest in scuba diving. That year he discovered the underwater ruins of the ancient Koneswaram temple in Trincomalee. Clarke augmented his fame later on in the 1980s, from being the host of several television shows such as Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World. He lived in Sri Lanka until his death.

Clarke was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1989 "for services to British cultural interests in Sri Lanka". He was knighted in 1998 and was awarded Sri Lanka's highest civil honour, Sri Lankabhimanya, in 2005.

---From Wikipedia || Lester del Rey was born Leonard Knapp in Saratoga, Minnesota, the son of poor sharecroppers of partly Spanish ancestry.  His mother died shortly after his birth, and he managed to complete high school and two years at George Washington University before dropping out for economic reasons.  He started publishing stories in pulp magazines in the late 1930s. He was closely associated Astounding Science Fiction, then the leading science fiction magazine. In 1935, his first wife was killed in a car accident.  By 1947 he had written enough solid short fiction to generate his first book, the anthology And Some Were Human.  In the 1950s, he was a leading science fiction writer.  After marrying his second wife in 1945, he became a full-time writer. In 1947 he met the literary agent Scott Meredith at a convention and he began working for Meredith's agency as a reader and office manager.  He later made his way into editing for pulp magazines and then for book publishers. In 1952 and 1953, he edited Space SF, Fantasy Fiction, Science Fiction Adventures (as Philip St. John), Rocket Stories (as Wade Kampfaert), and Fantasy Fiction (as Cameron Hall).  He was most successful editing for Ballantine Books with his final wife, Judy-Lynn del Rey, and founded a popular science fiction imprint with her at Ballantine, Del Rey Books, in 1977. || Hugo Gernsback, born Hugo Gernsbacher, was a Luxembourgish-American inventor, writer, editor, and magazine publisher, best known for publications including the first science fiction magazine. His contributions to the genre as publisher were so significant, that the annual awards presented at the World Science Fiction Convention are named the "Hugos" in his honour. - Wikipedia || Robert Anson Heinlein was an American science fiction writer. Often called "the dean of science fiction writers", he was one of the most popular, influential, and controversial authors of the genre. He set a high standard for science and engineering plausibility and helped to raise the genre's standards of literary quality. He was one of the first writers to break into mainstream, general magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, in the late 1940s, with unvarnished science fiction. He was among the first authors of bestselling, novel-length science fiction in the modern, mass-market era. For many years, Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke were known as the "Big Three" of science fiction. ([Source](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_A._Heinlein).) || Fritz Reuter Leiber Jr. (December 24, 1910 – September 5, 1992) was an American writer of fantasy, horror, and science fiction. He was also a poet, actor in theater and films, playwright and chess expert. With writers such as Robert E. Howard and Michael Moorcock, Leiber can be regarded as one of the fathers of sword and sorcery fantasy, having coined the term. 

**Source**: [Fritz Leiber](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Leiber) on Wikipedia. || Theodore Sturgeon was born Edward Hamilton Waldo in Staten Island, New York.  He changed his name in 1929, choosing Sturgeon to match his mother's surname after her second marriage, and "Theodore" to match his nickname, "Teddy."  His mother, Christine Hamilton Dicker Sturgeon, was a well-educated writer, watercolorist, and poet who published journalism, poetry and fiction under the pseudonym Felix Sturgeon.

As an adolescent, Sturgeon wanted to be a circus acrobat, but then had an episode of rheumatic fever.  From 1935 to 1938, he was a sailor in the merchant marine. He sold his first story in 1938, and his first science fiction story, "Ether Breather" was published in Astounding Science Fiction in 1939.  A few of his early pulp stories were published under the pseudonym "E. Waldo Hunter."  

He married his first wife, Dorothe Fillingame, in 1940.  That year, they moved to the West Indies, where Sturgeon managed a hotel for about a year.  He served in the U.S. Army during World War II, and in 1944 he returned to the U.S. and worked as an advertising copywriter.  He divorced in 1945, and married singer Mary Mair in 1949 until an annulment in 1951.  In 1950, he published his first novel, The Dreaming Jewels.  In 1951, he married Marion McGahan and they had a son in 1952, a daughters in 1954, a daughter in 1956, and a son in 1960.  In 1963, he ghost-wrote the Ellery Queen mystery novel The Player on the Other Side, which received critical praise.  He wrote two screenplays for the television show Star Trek in 1966 and 1967, and one screenplay for the show Land of the Lost in 1975, and two of his stories were adapted for The New Twilight Zone.  At the height of his popularity in the 1950s he was the most anthologized author alive.

His last long-term committed relationship was with writer and educator Jayne Engelhart Tannehill, with whom he remained until the time of his death.  He died in May of 1985 of lung fibrosis, in Eugene, Oregon. || Alfred Elton van Vogt was born on a farm in Edenburg, a Russian Mennonite community east of Gretna, Manitoba. Early in his career he wrote for true confession pulp magazines like True Story, but in the late 1930s he began writing science fiction, which he was more interested in. His first published SF story, "Black Destroyer" was published in 1939, and is considered to be one of the first works of the Golden Age of science fiction. In 1941 he left his job at the Department of National Defence to become a full-time writer, and he went on to write a large number of short stories. In 1944 he moved to Hollywood, California. In the 1950s he briefly became involved in L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics projects. Although he left Dianetics, he claimed that Hubbard's followers continued to harass him, and he stopped writing for a few years. In the 1960s Frederik Pohl convinced him to start writing again, and he wrote novels (as opposed to short stories that were later developed into novels) until his death in 2000.