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Sunday 22 May 2022
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 20 May 2022
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Ayckbourn, Alan
(1939- ) UK playwright, active from 1959 with at least eighty-five plays produced; much of his work verges into Fantastika, some of which is of strong specific sf interest, including a triad of dramas which might almost (but not quite) be thought of as a loose series devoted to Androids in distressed English domestic environments. Henceforward (performed 1987; 1988) is set in an oppressive Near Future where a blocked composer uses his personal Robot to reshape his bad ...
Vector
The journal of the British Science Fiction Association (BSFA). There have been 281 issues from 1958 to Winter 2015-2016. / Vector has been published since the foundation of the BSFA in 1958, fairly regularly since the 1970s. E C Tubb was its first editor (#1), and it has had many editors since then, including Terry Jeeves (#2-#4, 1958-1959) and Michael Moorcock briefly as co-editor (#5-#7, 1959-1960). Both production and literary quality have fluctuated severely from editor to editor, and ...
Extrapolation [magazine]
Critical magazine, edited by Thomas D Clareson from its inception in December 1959; Donald M Hassler joined Clareson from the Winter 1987 issue, and became sole editor from the Spring 1990 issue, a dominant role he maintained, though the designation of his role changed at least once, until he retired in 2007. The journal has since been edited by several scholars acting as a board; they include Andrew M Butler, Michael Levy, Javier A Martinez, Wendy Pearson and John Rieder. Extrapolation ...
Lepucki, Edan
(? - ) US journalist and author whose first work of fiction, If You're Not Yet Like Me (2010 chap), is a novella whose narrator addresses her thoughts and memories to her unborn child. Her first full-length novel, California (2014), is sf, set in a moderately distant Near Future California transformed by economic scarcity, the dissolution of effective government, and general Climate Change into a Dystopian territory dominated by "Communities" (Orwellian ...
Ings, Simon
(1965- ) UK author who began publishing sf with "Blessed Fields" in Other Edens III (anth 1989) edited by Christopher Evans and Robert P Holdstock; and who has become moderately prolific as an author of short stories. His first novel, Hot Head (1992), heatedly and congestedly, and with moments of Cyberpunk-ish brilliance, presents the life-story and adventures – in Virtual Reality and other realms – of a lesbian Muslim wanderer in the early twenty-first ...
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 and one Semiprozine Hugo for his self-produced news magazine, Ansible (which see). His one ...