Wired.com presents the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy. And here is your host, David Barr-Kirtley.

Hello and welcome to episode 219 of Geek's Guide to the Galaxy.

Our guest today is Michael R. Page.

He's a lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Nebraska

and author of the book The Literary Imagination

from Erasmus Darwin to H.G. Wells,

Science, Evolution, and Ecology.

And we'll be speaking with him today about his new book, Frederick Paul,

the latest volume in the Modern Masters of Science Fiction series from the University of Illinois Press.

And now here's our interview with Michael R. Page.

All right, so we're here with Michael R. Page.

Welcome to the show.

Thank you.

Glad to be here.

Okay, and so this book has a board from David Bryn that says, Frederick Pole did more than any other human

to transform the very character of science fiction literature.

Do you agree with that? I think in a sense, Fred Pole was one of the most

significant figures in the field, not just for his writing his fiction work, but what he did as an agent in the late 40s and early 1950s to really kind of get the field established, if you will, outside of just the cult marketplace.

And certainly as an editor throughout the 50, 60s, and 70s,

he played a significant role. He was the editor of Galaxy and If during the 1960s when that those magazines were the leading magazines in the field.

He had started the Star Science Fiction anthology. in the original anthology

original anthology series that that got that sort of

...