It’s a Friday afternoon in October at the University of California, Riverside, and I’m at the Tomás Rivera Library to learn about UCR’s Eaton Collection of Science Fiction & Fantasy. To do that, I’ve made an appointment with Dr. Phoenix Alexander, the Jay Kay and Doris Klein Librarian for Science Fiction and Fantasy, responsible for maintaining the Eaton Collection.
J. Lloyd Eaton was a doctor and avid science fiction book collector. During his lifetime, he amassed seventy-five hundred science fiction titles. In 1969, the collection was purchased by UCR in order to preserve it in its entirety rather than risk it being sold off piecemeal. Since then, the collection has grown to around three hundred thousand items, including not just books but individual authors’ papers, plus collectibles like action figures, pins, posters, and movies.
To get to Special Collections and University Archives, where the Eaton Collection is housed, I take the elevator to the fourth floor where Dr. Alexander is waiting. In his office is a library cart stacked with hundreds of Dragon Magazine issues which he tells me may very well be the magazine’s entire print run, 359 issues from 1976-2007, but it’s still being catalogued. A recent donation.
We go down the long hallway toward the reading room where, if you have a library card, you can peruse items from the collection. Fun fact: You do not need to be affiliated with UCR to get a library card, though they may charge if you’re not. (K-12 teachers and administrators are free, as are local high school IB, STEM Capstone, and RCC Honors students. As an over-55 community member, I got one at the senior rate of $40.)
The reading room also hosts a rotating slate of exhibitions. Today it is, “Neon in the Gutters: Cyberpunk Visions of the Future,” curated by Dr. Alexander’s colleague, Andrew Lippert. Glass cases artfully display comics along with didactics explaining their significance.
We enter “the stacks,” e.g. the seemingly endless rows of shelves housing the collection. One could get lost in here forever if you didn’t have a guide. Fortunately for me, I have one.
Dr. Alexander points out the different sections as we go. When we get to the role-playing-game rule books, he tips a favorite out for me to see: “Coyote and Crow,” an RPG created by Native Americans and set in an alternate future in which North America never was colonized.
Next, my eye is drawn to a row of candy-colored Big Little Books from the 60s and 70s: Batman, Major Matt Mason, and Frankenstein Jr., alongside Lassie, Bonzanza, and Tarzan. I am curious as to which book in the Eaton collection is the oldest: Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World; published in 1666, it is considered a forerunner to today’s science fiction. Other significant holdings include the 1966 issue of Fantastic Four which marks the first appearance of the Black Panther in comics.
When we get to the periodicals, Dr. Alexander lights up. “I’m in here!”
He reaches for the top shelf and pulls out an issue of the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction: his name and the title of his story is on the cover. He comes by his love for the genre naturally as both a writer and a reader of fantasy and science fiction.
Prior to coming to UCR for his dream job with the Eaton Collection, which according to the Eatonverse Facebook page is “the world's largest publicly-accessible collection of science fiction, fantasy, horror and utopian literature,” he was at the University of Liverpool, where he curated Europe’s largest collection of catalogued science fiction. Before that, he was at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale, where he received his Ph.D. in English and African American Studies, with a focus on Afrofuturism.
This brings me to the individual authors’ papers in the collection. These are especially important for researchers. I’m excited to learn that the collection contains early drafts of John Jennings’ graphic novel interpretation of Octavia Butler’s Kindred as well as housing the papers of Nalo Hopkinson, Tananarive Due, and Steven Barnes, among others.
“Our role is to collect things that ask questions,” Dr. Alexander tells me. I can appreciate that.
We’re approaching the end of our tour when I remember there is a section devoted to UFOs. I ask, “Do you believe in UFOs?”
“I do,” he answers. We have a brief exchange about the vastness of the universe and how unlikely it would be if we were the only ones in it.
While we’re on the subject of spooky things, I ask, “Do you believe in ghosts?”
“I do! I’m a little bit spooky,” he says.
I get it. I’m a little bit spooky, too, if by ‘spooky’ we mean that we allow for possibilities beyond our comprehension; that stretch our conception of what might be.
The wonderful thing about science fiction, speculative fiction, fantasy, is how prescient it can be. H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov—each of them envisioned technologies that were decades from invention.
If that’s not spooky, I don’t know what is.
From 1979 to 2013, UCR held an annual Eaton Conference on Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature. In 2025, it resumed as an annual online symposium. Follow them on your favorite social media @eatonverse and keep an eye out for registration for the next Eaton Symposium, free and online, set for January 7, 2027.
