
University of California, Riverside

UCR Newsroom



UCR is Tops in Science Fiction Collections


UC Riverside Science Fiction Trove Winning Literary War of the Worlds

J. Lloyd Eaton Collection “Premier” in United States, Largest on Planet

(July 15, 2005)

NEWS MEDIA CONTACT

Name: Kris Lovekin
Tel: (951) 827-2495
E-mail:
George Slusser, curator emeritusEnlarge

George Slusser, curator emeritus

RIVERSIDE, Calif. (www.ucr.edu) -- The interplanetary conflict of Spielberg’s current movie blockbuster notwithstanding, UC Riverside’s Tomas Rivera Library houses the dominant force in an ongoing “War of the Worlds” focused on literature and culture -- as well as on spaceships, alien invasions and vaporizing rays.

UC Riverside’s J. Lloyd Eaton Science Fiction Collection is the largest in the world, and the most useful to scholars of any in the nation, according to the latest edition one of the field’s most authoritative reference works.

The Eaton Collection is “the premier collection in the U.S.,” states the fifth edition of “Anatomy of Wonder: A Critical Guide to Science Fiction,” edited by Neil Barron. The collection embraces every branch of science fiction, plus fantasy and horror, the reference says, and boasts the largest holdings of 17th- to 19th-century utopian and dystopian fiction in North America.

It is an accumulation that inspires admiration, and even envy, among curators and librarians of other science fiction collections.

“It’s definitely a race,” said Professor George Slusser, curator emeritus of the collection. “We’ve been at the top for the last 10 years, but there are others catching up.”

“Anatomy of Wonder” estimates the Eaton Collection at 295,000 items, but that’s old news, Slusser said -- and it’s a rather conservative estimate in any case; a recent acquisition of thousands of science fiction fan magazines from UCLA puts the total at close to 350,000. The collection includes original manuscripts, periodicals, magazines, comic books, literary papers and much more memorabilia. Housed in the library’s Special Collections Department, the collection holds 90 percent of English-language science fiction, fantasy and horror published in the 20th century, plus a wide range of works in Spanish, French, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, German and 12 other languages.

And yes, among its rare and valuable first editions is H.G. Wells’ original 1898 “War of the Worlds.”

The science fiction of popular culture -- movies like Spielberg’s version of “War of the Worlds” and TV shows like “Star Trek” -- owes an enormous debt to the written science fiction that makes up the bulk of the collection, Slusser said.

“Moviemakers like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg learned from science fiction stories in books and magazines,” Slusser said. “They read it and it inspired them. Where else do they get their storylines? The heart of it is here, in written science fiction."

Under Slusser’s direction the Eaton Collection has expanded twenty-fold, generating dozens of international conferences and attracting scholars from around the world to do original research in science fiction, fantasy and mass culture.

“Anatomy of Wonder” puts the collection at the top, worldwide, of its “Statistical Summary of the 26 Largest Science Fiction and Fantasy Collections.” Next in line, with 130,000 items, is Phantastische Bibliothek Wetzlar in Germany. After that comes The University of Louisville, with 100,000 items. UCLA’s and Cal State Fullerton’s highly regarded collections are 15th and 21st on the list, respectively.

The collection was established at UC Riverside in 1969, when Oakland physician J. Lloyd Eaton, a prominent West Coast science fiction fan who hobnobbed with the likes of authors Robert A. Heinlein and Ray Bradbury, sold his 6,000-book collection to then-librarian Donald Wilson. It has since assimilated several other large collections and is growing by thousands of items per year.

The University of California, Riverside (www.ucr.edu) is a doctoral research university, a living laboratory for groundbreaking exploration of issues critical to Inland Southern California, the state and communities around the world. Reflecting California's diverse culture, UCR's enrollment has exceeded 21,000 students. The campus opened a medical school in 2013 and has reached the heart of the Coachella Valley by way of the UCR Palm Desert Center. The campus has an annual statewide economic impact of more than $1 billion.

A broadcast studio with fiber cable to the AT&T Hollywood hub is available for live or taped interviews. UCR also has ISDN for radio interviews. To learn more, call (951) UCR-NEWS.

More Information 

General Campus Information

University of California, Riverside
900 University Ave.
Riverside, CA 92521
Tel: (951) 827-1012

Department Information

Media Relations
900 University Avenue
1156 Hinderaker Hall
Riverside, CA 92521

Tel: (951) 827-6397 (951) UCR-NEWS
Fax: (951) 827-5008

Related Links

Footer
http://newsroom.ucr.edu/news_item.html?action=page&id=1124
newsroom.ucr.edu
crawl=CC-MAIN-2014-15
23617
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:KBU2YLJ357BGGECFQGBSINMBKIWLCRGK
<urn:uuid:11ed98cb-1bdd-49b9-8928-e58d687b5bd9>
2014-04-24T16:14:10Z
138.23.226.208
sha1:GF3YUKEJKBSQQCAYOTPCVI5WC2OQHZMP
<urn:uuid:f3f36d40-6b68-426f-b453-be0d9067e873>
http://newsroom.ucr.edu/news_item.html?action=page&id=1124
length
response
<urn:uuid:276b3454-4ee5-4f11-9493-bdb9c55dfef9>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-147-4-33.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2014-15
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web with URLs provided by Blekko for April 2014
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf