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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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Houghton, Claude
Working name of UK author Claude Houghton Oldfield (1889-1961), known primarily outside the sf field. Unfit for active service in World War One, he served in the Admiralty. Some pining frustration at a missed destiny can be detected in the poems assembled as his first book, The Phantom Host and Other Verses (coll 1917 chap); the Pastoral calm depicted in the titular verse-drama from ...
Pandorum
Film (2009). Constantin Film/Impact Pictures. Produced by Paul W S Anderson, Jeremy Bolt, Robert Kulzer, directed by Christian Alvart. Written by Travis Milloy, based on a story by Alvart and Milloy. Cast includes Ben Foster, Dennis Quaid and Antje Traue. 103 minutes. Colour. / An unremarkable but effective entry into the canon of "monster in a tin can" space Horror films, as exemplified by ...
Rosewater, Frank
(1856-1934) US reformer and author whose arguments about the Utopia – focused on a reiterated argument that all income should be spent in the year of its earning – shape his obscurely told fictions. Two are of some interest: '96: A Romance of Utopia (1894; vt Utopia: A Romance of Today 1894) [for subtitles for this and the next title cited, see Checklist], whose protagonists travel by balloon to a ...
Ocampo, Silvina
(1903-1993) Argentinian editor, journalist, painter, poet and author, married to Adolfo Bioy Casares from 1940 until her death, long associated with Jorge Luis Borges mainly through the almost conjugal conversations between their fiction, much of which in both cases was written in the late 1930s and 1940s; and as collaborator in the extremely influential Antologia de la Literatura Fantástica (anth ...
Gibson, Gary
(1965- ) Scots author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Mother Love" for Skeleton Crew in March 1991, and whose first novel, Angel Stations (2004), neatly follows the pattern of the "new Space Opera", the kind of baroquely expansive tale which exfoliated in the late twentieth century and whose most comprehensive example may be Dan Simmons's Hyperion Cantos (omni ...
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 ...