Jacques Sadoul

Who was Jacques Sadoul?

Jacques Sadoul was a French novelist, book editor and non-fiction author.

His Histoire de la science fiction moderne 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 was 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.

He was one of the first editors to launch SF successfully in paperback form in France. He was born at Agen, and 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, is a book of SF illustrations which he gathered, mostly black-and-white, a selection of SF nostalgia material, but has no index.