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Wednesday 8 May 2024
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for the masthead; here for Acknowledgments; here for the FAQ; here for advice on citations. Find entries via the search box above (more details here) or browse the menu categories in the grey bar at the top of this page.
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Auster, Paul
(1947-2024) US translator, screenwriter and author, active from around 1970, who came to sudden attention – after years of unrecognized work, culminating in an undemanding Baseball mystery, Squeeze Play (1984) as by Paul Benjamin – with a series of Fabulations playing on detective genres and the French nouveau roman. City of Glass (1985), Ghosts (1986) and ...
Shiel, M P
(1865-1947) Montserrat-born author with his surname given as Shiell, in the UK from around 1883. He began writing fiction in the late 1880s and continued intermittently until his death, his first work of genre interest being "Huguenin's Wife" for Pall Mall Magazine in April 1895; most of his short fiction of fantastic interest was published 1896-1901. Shiel was intensely concerned with style per se, incorporating poetic techniques into narrative ...
Dominican Republic
Among the Hispanic islands of the Caribbean basin, the Dominican Republic is perhaps the country that shows the smallest amount of sf production. Although Josefina de la Cruz's (? - ) Una casa en el espacio ["A House in Space"] (1986) could be considered the first sf work from the island, this cannot be accepted without controversy owing to its generic ambivalence, Equipoisal between sf (perhaps), ...
Wilson, Hazel
(1898-1992) US librarian and author, almost always for younger readers. She is best known for the Herbert sequence about adventures of a young lad whose careless parents allow him to get into pickles, beginning with Herbert (1950). Of some sf interest is Herbert's Space Trip (1955), where Herbert saves an Alien planet from disaster with the help of his Uncle Horace, who is resourceful, like most uncles in twentieth-century children's ...
Phillips, Roland Ashford
(1884-1969) US author, who worked under his own name and some unidentified pseudonyms; of sf interest is Golden Isle (1925), featuring a yacht which converts into a submarine (see Inventions), and which carries its owners to a Caribbean Island at the heart of which a Lost World is discovered. [JC]
Langford, David
(1953- ) UK author, critic, editor, publisher and sf fan, in the latter capacity recipient of 21 Hugo awards for fan writing – some of the best of his several hundred pieces are assembled as Let's Hear It for the Deaf Man (coll 1992 chap US; much exp vt The Silence of the Langford 1996; exp 2015 ebook) as Dave Langford, edited by Ben Yalow – plus five Best Fanzine Hugos ...