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Wednesday 6 July 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.
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Johnson, Henry T
(1858-1931) UK editor and author, extremely prolific from an early age, producing boys' stories (see Boys' Papers; Children's SF) for many markets; The Ape Man (circa 1930) is an Apes as Human adventure for the Young Adult market. [JC]
Kainen, Ray
Usual pseudonym of US author Ray Kainulainen (? - ), who also published his erotic sf (see Sex) as by Ray Kalnen. His work – all of it released within a four-year period – was sharply told and occasionally witty, as in the fantasticated parody of Terry Southern's Candy (1964) in A Sea of Thighs (1968), or per the punning title of his last novel, Satyr Trek (1970), notionally a Space Opera. [JC]
Thomas, Chauncey
(1822-1898) US author of a technocratic Utopia, The Crystal Button; Or Adventures of Paul Prognosis in the Forty-Ninth Century (1891); the text was apparently drafted in the 1870s, and only submitted for publication after the success of Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888), when it was edited by George Houghton (of Houghton, Mifflin and Company). The protagonist, seemingly brain-damaged in 1872, travels in a dream-state to the year 4872, where he learns of the benign turn the world has ...
Logsdon, Syd
(1947- ) US teacher and author whose first sf novel, Jandrax (1979), is a Planetary Romance whose inhabitants, two generations after their Starship has been stranded, have created two contrasting societies on the planet: a "stationary" order governed by the passengers' version of a unifying Monomythos (see Religion); and a migratory culture created by the crew, after they have been exiled from their ship. Logsdon's second novel, A Fond Farewell to Dying (June 1978 Galaxy ...
Barbour, Douglas
(1940-2021) Canadian poet (author of at least fourteen volumes of poems, initially under the influence of Ezra Pound) and academic, a professor of English at the University of Alberta; his "Patterns of Meaning in the SF Novels of Ursula K. Le Guin, Joanna Russ and Samuel R. Delany, 1962-1972", accepted by Queen's University in 1976, was the first Canadian doctoral dissertation in the field of sf. A competent study of Delany was spun off from this volume: Worlds Out of Words: The SF Novels of ...
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 ...