Andy Sawyer, born in Manchester in 1952, spent his working life close to science fiction. He started in fandom, editing the British Science Fiction Association's Matrix in 1977 and 1978 and its review magazine Paperback Inferno from 1985 to 1992. In 1993 he became librarian of the Science Fiction Foundation Collection when it moved to the University of Liverpool. He held the post until 2018 and taught on the university's MA in Science Fiction Studies.
He is a critic, reviewer and editor, not a novelist. His reviews have run in Foundation, where he became Reviews Editor in 1996, and in Strange Horizons. He has also written essays on John Wyndham, Olaf Stapledon, Terry Pratchett, Gwyneth Jones and Ursula Le Guin, and contributed to reference works such as the seventh edition of the Oxford Companion to English Literature.
Some of his projects are public ones. He co-curated the British Library exhibition Out of This World in 2011. With David Ketterer he co-edited Plan for Chaos, a previously unpublished Wyndham novel, in 2009. With Peter Wright he edited Teaching Science Fiction, a collection on how the genre can be taught at university level. In 2008 the Science Fiction Research Association gave him its Thomas D. Clareson Award for service to the field.
The book to start with is the Penguin Classics edition of H. G. Wells's The Invisible Man. Patrick Parrinder edited the text and Christopher Priest wrote the introduction. Sawyer's notes sit at the back, where a reader can check the references and background of the novel without interrupting the story. If you then want to see how he thinks about the genre as a whole, Teaching Science Fiction is the next step.
