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Wednesday 15 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.
Site updated on 13 January 2025
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Livesey, Eric M
(1932-2004) UK author of The Desolate Land (1964), a Ruined Earth where – long after the Disaster of a nuclear test gone awry – Monsters spawned by radioactivity roam, a circumstance that does not keep the rump of America from using A-bombs to keep Latin Americans at bay. [JC]
Graphic Novel
To speak of the graphic novel is to speak of a particular kind of Comic book – usually a book-length work in the comics format published in a non-periodical format – but to do so is to risk applying what has become a marketing term to questions of definition, transforming a practical distinction into what looks superficially like a separate genre. In 2004, in response to the widespread misunderstanding of the implications of the term, the artist and ...
Cooper, Clare
Working name of Brenda Clare Cooper (1935- ), UK author – not to be confused with the US writer Brenda Cooper – almost exclusively of novels for Young Adult readers, beginning with David's Ghost (1980). Of her tales of genre interest, the Simon Jones sequence, beginning with The Black Horn (1981), is fantasy; Earthchange (1985) describes a ...
Broom Lynne, James
(1916-1995) UK painter, designer, illustrator, teacher and author, sometimes using the original hyphenated form of his surname, Broom-Lynne; he also wrote as by James Quartermain. Almost all his fiction is nonfantastic, with the exception of Drag Hunt (1969), set in a Satirized Dystopian Near Future where violence is encouraged as a social pacifier, and – as in other sf extrapolations ...
Mills, Robert E
(1938- ) US author, mostly of Westerns, who began writing sf with the Fellowship of Light Space Opera sequence, comprising Star Quest (1978), Star Fighters (1978) and Star Force (1978), in which the Fellowship of Light (which is good) saves the galaxy from the Death Legion (which is not). Under the Eye of Night (1980) is a novel of the occult. ...
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 ...