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Tuesday 18 January 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.
Site updated on 17 January 2022
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
King Kong
1. Film (1933). RKO. Directed by Merian C Cooper, Ernest B Schoedsack. Written by James A Creelman, Ruth Rose, from a story by Cooper, with credit also given to Edgar Wallace. Special effects designed and supervised by Willis H O'Brien. Cast includes Robert Armstrong, Bruce Cabot and Fay Wray. 100 minutes. Black and white. / The classic Monster Movie. On a remote Island inhabited by unfriendly natives, prehistoric Dinosaurs (including a Brontosaurus, Stegosaurus and Tyrannosaurus rex) and ...
Kacvinsky, Katie
(? - ) US author whose work has been restricted to the Young Adult market, with an emphasis on teenage romances; in the Maddie sequence beginning with Awaken (2011), this pattern is integrated with some smoothness into an sf world: a Near Future California whose Dystopian nature is sensed by the young protagonist when she finds it extremely difficult to leave the Computer- and internet-driven Media Landscape whose claustrophobic protectiveness is more or ...
Sympson, Revd Joseph
(1715-1807) UK minister – Vicar of Wythburn – and author, a friend of William Wordsworth (1770-1850), whose son, Joseph Sympson (? -? ) was also a poet. The elder Sympson's book-length poem, Science Revived; Or, the Vision of Alfred: A Poem in Eight Books (1802), though essentially a fantasy of history, has some Proto SF interest when the spirit of Alfred the Great is transported to another Star by the Goddess of Science, from which vantage he is ...
Rall, Ted
(1963- ) US author of a Graphic Novel, 2024 (graph 2001), a Satire of Near Future corporate America – here known as Canamexicusa – explicitly using George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) as its model. Moments of Orwellian hectic intensity, in this case, tend to explode into spoof. [JC]
Berlyn, Michael
(1949- ) US author and computer-game designer (see Cyborg) whose first novel, the sf adventure Crystal Phoenix (1980), received some adverse comment for the amount of female Torture it contains. The Integrated Man (1980) projects a Dystopian future for urbanized humanity, with a plot based on the shunting of human consciousness into Computer chips, reminiscent in this of John T Sladek's The Müller-Fokker Effect (1970). Blight (1981) as by Mark Sonders, is an ...
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 ...