Judy-Lynn Del Rey, the "Mama of Star Wars," is also behind much of modern fantasy.

What would the fantasy genre be without Miracle Max or the quest to confront the Warlock Lord with the Sword of Shannara? PBS recently tried to paint such a landscape with its short documentary, "Judy-Lynn Del Rey: The Galaxy Gal." This twelve-minute documentary covered much of the story, but according to TheConversation.com, "the episode could tell only half of del Rey's story, passing over how she affected science fiction and fantasy themselves."

"The most brilliant editor I ever encountered."

Dennis Wise recently expounded on Del Rey's contributions in "The woman who revolutionized the fantasy genre is finally getting her due." To understand part of Judy-Lynn's legacy, we can look at the praise given her by authors she worked with. My heart is torn between space battles and Silmarils, so I took note of the fact that Philip K. Dick called her "the greatest editor since Maxwell Perkins." That's right. The author of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep compared her to the man who edited Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Del Rey Books kept me coming into bookstores as the publishers of many Star Wars books. The the Hugo Award committee never recognized her contributions in life and "tried granting her a posthumous award, but her husband, Lester, refused to accept it, saying that it came too late."

Judy-Lynn Del Rey is not just the founder of Del Rey books and the editor all authors wish they had. A woman with dwarfism, she was an editorial assistant for Galaxy magazine before rising to the rank of senior editor for Ballantine Books. Wise commended the fact that she "chose to work within the publishing landscape as it actually existed in the 1970s, rather than the one she only wished existed."

"As you wish."

It was in 1975 that Judy-Lynn and Lester began to develop a fantasy line of books and one of their early projects is one of the cult classics of the 1980s. Says Wise, The Princess Bride "might have faded into obscurity had del Rey not been determined to revive Ballantine's backlist." Without Del Rey Books' 1977 rerelease of William Goldman's 1973 novel "the novel -and the film - might never have found its later successes."

We can also thank the Del Reys for bringing us classics such as The Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks and Stephen R. Donaldson's The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever. At Del Rey books, "even though Lester edited the fantasy authors, Judy-Lynn oversaw the imprint and the marketing."

One has to agree with Wise, who asserts that "the time may be ripe to celebrate the foresight and iconoclasm of a publisher who expanded speculative fiction beyond the borders of a small genre fandom."