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Monday 9 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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Ellison, Harlan
(1934-2018) US author, the most controversial and among the finest of those writers associated with sf whose careers began in the 1950s. For many years he insisted that he was not in fact primarily an sf writer, and indeed most of his large oeuvre is better described as nonfantastic, or Fantasy, or Horror; but his influence on the field – or more accurately perhaps his example, as he became famous through writing little but ...
McMullan, Thomas
(? - ) Scottish teacher, journalist and author resident in England. The protagonist of his first novel, The Last Good Man (2020), which is set in the Near Future after a pervasive Pandemic-like planetary Disaster, escapes a disintegrating City to visit the remote village where his cousin lives. Impossibly placid and twee, ...
Kingsbury, Donald
(1929- ) US-born academic and author, in Canada from 1948, naturalized in 1955, a teacher of mathematics at McGill University from 1956 until his retirement in 1986. He began publishing sf with "The Ghost Town" in Astounding for June 1952; he produced relatively little for nearly 30 years, though his intermittent appearances in Astounding, with both fiction and nonfiction, were generally noticed. What could not have been ...
Flatland
The two-Dimensional realm first depicted by Edwin A Abbott in Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884; rev 1884), initially as by A Square. Flatland has provoked a number of more or less didactic Sequels by Other Hands which build in various ways on Abbott's neat analogy for imagining a hypothetical fourth spatial Dimension in ...
Baird, Thomas
(1923-1990) US art historian, a lecturer with the Frick Collection 1954-1957, latterly a professor of art; his several well-received novels, beginning with Triumphal Entry (1962), often dealt with art history; none of this early work contained any significant element of the fantastic, but Where Time Ends (1988) is a Young Adult tale of some interest set in a Near Future world threatened by biological ...
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 ...