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Thursday 30 March 2023
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.
Site updated on 29 March 2023
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Brown, Eric
(1960-2023) UK author who began publishing sf – after a children's play, Noel's Ark (1982 chap) – with "Krash-Bangg Joe and the Pineal-Zen Equation" for Interzone in Autumn 1987; like several further tales assembled in The Time-Lapsed Man and Other Stories (coll 1990), it is set in a future world dominated by the effects of bio-engineering and dense with information. This marriage of Cordwainer ...
World of Horror
UK letter-size saddle-stapled Cinema magazine, printed on middle-grade paper. Published by Dalruth Publishing Group, then Gresham Publishing. Editor: Gent Shaw. Ten bimonthly issues, 1974 to 1975. / Subtitled "An Anthology of the Macabre from Film and Fiction", this magazine differed from most such contemporary titles published in either the UK or US in that it featured considerable internal colour material, then uncommon. It also ran ...
Flipside of Dominick Hide, The
Made-for-tv film (1980). BBC TV. Directed by Alan Gibson. Teleplay Gibson, Jeremy Paul. Cast includes Peter Firth, Pippa Guard, Caroline Langrishe and Patrick Magee. 95 minutes. Colour. / This was an unexpected success, winning several awards. Hide (Firth) travels back in a flying saucer (see UFOs) from the somewhat austere 2130 CE to contemporary London to do historical research. A Candide-figure, he is confused but cheerful about what he finds, falls in ...
Mule
Videogame (1983). Ozark Softscape. Designed by Danielle Bunten Berry. Platforms: Atari8, C64 (1983); MSX (1988); NES (1990). / MULE is an important link between traditional Board Games, played by people who are spatially and socially close to one another, and Online Worlds, often played by people who are spatially remote but socially close. Its gameplay ...
Wang Lixiong
(1953- ) Chinese political activist and author, whose sole genre novel to date was banned in the People's Republic but widely read among overseas Chinese. The son of a screenwriter and the vice-president of an automobile factory, Wang was exiled to the Chinese countryside from 1969-1973 for "re-education" during the Cultural Revolution. His father committed suicide in 1968. Rehabilitated as a model worker and permitted to attend the Jilin ...
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 ...