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Friday 6 December 2024
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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VanderMeer, Jeff
(1968- ) US editor and author, married to Ann VanderMeer, who began to publish work of genre interest, after at least one story published in college, with "So the Dead Walk Slowly" in Fear for November 1989, and who is probably best known for the Ambergris sequence of novels and tales, which begins with two novellas, Dradin, in Love: A Tale of Elsewhen & Otherwhere (1996 chap) and ...
Finn, Ralph L
(1912-1999) UK author and journalist who published widely, collecting some of his short fiction as Collected Stories of Ralph L Finn (coll 1946 chap); in his notes on "This Sorry Scheme" (magazine publication undated), George Locke suggests that the tale prefigures Jack Finney's far more complex Time and Again (1970). Of some sf interest are three novels based on the time theories of J W ...
Sketchley, Martin
(1967- ) UK author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Morals Profane" for Xenos #30 in April 1995. His principal sf achievement is the effectively written Delgado/Structure trilogy, comprising The Affinity Trap (2004), The Destiny Mask (2005) and The Liberty Gun (2006). This opens on a Dystopian future Earth whose unpleasant military dictatorship is opposed by the flawed ...
Greenlee, Sam
(1930-2014) US author in whose Near-Future sf novel, The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1969), a Black man becomes second-in-command in the CIA, where he is the agency's eponymous token spook (a word which here does double duty as racial slur and slang for intelligence agent). He quits to organize Black uprisings in the Cities all across a diseased, racist America, making use of everything he has learned from his years as an ...
Quinn, Daniel
(1935-2018) US author who began publishing work of genre interest with Dreamer (1988), which reads initially as a dark Fantasy, but whose protagonist is in fact a victim of Dream Hacking; he came to wide notice with Ishmael (1992), which won the first and only Turner Tomorrow Award of $500,000, and was filmed as {Instinct} (1999) directed by Jon Turteltaub; it also ...
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 ...