1. US Comic strip conceived by John Flint Dille for the National Newspaper Syndicate Inc., written by Philip Francis Nowlan, based on his novel Armageddon 2419 AD (stories August 1928, March 1929 Amazing; fixup 1962). Buck Rogers appeared first in 1929 in daily newspapers, illustrated by Dick Calkins, and in March 1930 the Sunday version began, signed by Calkins although the actual illustrator was Russell Keaton (to 1933) and then Rick Yager (who also took over the daily strip in 1951). Calkins – whose illustration was embarrassingly inferior to that of his colleagues – was removed from the strip in 1947; Murphy Anderson drew the daily strip 1947-1949, followed by Leonard Dworkins 1949-1959,...
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(1960- ) US academic and author of Critical Synoptics: Menippean Satire and the Analysis of Intellectual Mythology (2000) which – over and above its unexpected conflation of Menippean Satire and the philosophical investigations of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) – interestingly questions the ascendency of academic criticism-from-above over more intimate – what he calls synaesthesiacal – criticism on the part of critics who begin with the texts themselves, and focus on the complexly questioning relationship of texts to the world into which they are embedded and with which they interact. His novel, Tally-Ho, Cornelius! (2008), is of sf interest for its transaction of the Jerry Cornelius qua...
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(1915-1978) US editor, actively involved in sf Fandom from the early 1930s, editing Fantasy Magazine, the leading Fanzine of its day; he also sold a few sf stories, starting with "The Price of Peace" for Amazing in November 1933 (this may have been preceded by a chapbook edition from Solar Publications, an imprint of Conrad H Ruppert's The ARRA Printers – see Small Presses and Limited Editions – but its existence has not been confirmed). In 1931, at a meeting of the Scienceers sf group, he met Julius Schwartz, who would become a lifelong collegiate, co-founding with Weisinger, Allen Glasser and Forrest J Ackerman what may have been the first Fanzine devoted solely to sf, The Time Traveller (...
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Stories of space stations or artificial satellites appear early in sf, the first example being Edward Everett Hale's extraordinary "The Brick Moon" (October-December 1869 Atlantic Monthly) and its sequel "Life in the Brick Moon" (February 1870 Atlantic), in which the satellite of the title consists of many brick spheres connected by brick arches, and is launched, with people on board, by gigantic flywheels. Kurd Laßwitz's Auf Zwei Planeten (1897; cut trans as Two Planets 1971) has Martian space stations shaped like spoked wheels floating above the poles, but these are kept hovering by gravity-control devices of a somewhat implausible kind. The first detailed and thoroughly scientific treatme...
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