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Tuesday 14 January 2025
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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Wiener, Norbert
(1894-1964) US mathematician and author who established the contemporary sense of the word Cybernetics in his highly influential nonfiction work Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948; exp rev 1961). Some of his further speculations in this field appear in The Human Use of Human Beings (1950) and in ...
Gurdon, J E
(1898-1973) UK soldier – as a World War One flying ace he won a DFC – and author, publishing many stories in UK magazines, and two books of some sf interest: Feeding the Wind (1924), featuring a Mad Scientist who almost blows up the world; and a Lost World tale for Young Adult readers, The Secret of the South (1950), featuring a ...
Weybright and Talley
US publisher, which was founded in 1966 and sold circa 1973 to David McKay Publications, who dissolved the imprint. It is remembered for discovering John Boyd and publishing his first nine novels. / Victor Weybright and Truman Talley (1925-2013) served as publisher and editor respectively, as they had done at New American Library in the 1950s and the first half of the ...
Assollant, Alfred
(1827-1886) French author whose strong republican views affected his career, sometimes damagingly, and which permeate his work as a whole, giving a mildly transgressive tone to the two tales so far translated into English. Histoire fantastique du célébre Pierrot (1860; trans A G Munro as The Fantastic History of the Celebrated Pierrot 1875) [for subtitles see Checklist below] is a spoofish Tall Tale recounting the triumphant ...
Hawkins, Peter
(1926- ) UK bank clerk whose first sf sale was "Life Cycle" for New Worlds in Spring 1951; his 14 stories under his own name all appeared in that magazine and in Science Fantasy over the following decade. He published a routine sf adventure, The Plant from Infinity (1954) as by Karl Maras, a House Name. [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 ...