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Thursday 23 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 23 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 ...
Hard SF
Item of sf Terminology coined by P Schuyler Miller in Astounding (November 1957) and since then widely used by sf Fandom and readers; it has sometimes overlapped in meaning with "hardcore sf", often used in the 1960s and 1970s to mean the kind of sf that repeats the themes and (to a degree) the style of the Genre SF written during the so-called ...
Capricorn One
Film (1977). Capricorn One Associates/Associated General/ITC. Directed by Peter Hyams. Written by Hyams. Cast includes James Brolin, Elliott Gould, Hal Holbrook, O J Simpson, Brenda Vaccaro and Sam Waterston. 124 minutes. Colour. / The premise of this Paranoia movie – made at a time, in the wake of Watergate, when secret-political-conspiracy films had become commonplace – is that a supposedly manned mission to ...
Adair, Gilbert
(1944-2011) Scottish literary theorist, critic, translator and author, in France 1968-1980, subsequently in the UK. His fiction has some fantasy interest, including his two Sequels by Other Hands for Young Adult readers, Alice Through the Needle's Eye (1984) and Peter Pan and the Only Children (1987), respectively sequelling Lewis Carroll and James Barrie ...
Astonishing Stories
US Pulp magazine, 16 issues February 1940 to April 1943, mostly bimonthly, published by Fictioneers, Inc, Chicago; edited February 1940 to September 1941 Frederik Pohl and November 1941 to April 1943 Alden H Norton. / Fictioneers, Inc was a subsidiary of Popular Publications. After the success of this magazine and its sister publication, Super Science Stories, both edited by the ...
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 ...