Jacques Sadoul

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Jacques Sadoul (b. 1934, in Agen) is a French author.

He has produced a number of anthologies on the history of science fiction.

His Histoire de la science fiction moderne (1973) was a major encouragement for the serious, academic study of SF, particularly among the East European peoples of that time, because the book was seen as very respectable, and, it was European, continental, while almost everything else science-fictional was produced across the Lamanche and across the Atlantic.

Sadoul is a well-known SF fan and magazine collector. In Paris, in 1973, he published an album of illustrations from American SF magazines, Hier, l’an 2000.

Those were the times when the year 2000 sounded very distant, and very science-fictional, so it was much found in SF titles.

He was one of the first editors to launch SF successfully in paperback form in France. He worked first with “Editions Opta” and then with “J’ai lu”, where he founded the SF imprint and edited the Les Meilleurs Recits series of anthologies of stories translated from the American pulp magazines. He was also a founder of the Prix Apollo award. Hier, l’an 2000: L’illustration de science fiction des annees 30 (1973; translated into English and published in the U.S. in 1975 as: 2000 A.D.: Illustrations From the Golden Age of Science Fiction Pulps), is a book of SF illustrations which he gathered, mostly black-and-white, a selection of SF nostalgia material, but has no index. His Histoire de la science-fiction moderne, 1911-1971 [“History of Modern SF”] (1973; in 2 volumes 1975; revised 1984) is a lengthy and enthusiastic survey of the field, but has been criticized for lacking deep critical analysis and containing too many sweeping generalizations and personal prejudices.

He wrote two novels of fantasy, La Passion selon Satan [“The Passion according to Satan”] (1960) and Le Jardin de la licorne [“The Garden of the Unicorn”] (1978).

He has authored works on alchemy, the fantastique and crime fiction.