SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 10 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.
Site updated on 9 December 2024
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Wignall, T C
(1881-1958) UK journalist and author, usually for children as Trevor Wignall, in active service during World War One. He began publishing in the magazines in 1912 or earlier; his sf novel Atoms (20 October-29 December 1922 Yellow Magazine; 1923) with G D Knox posits a world with abundant Power Sources including Nuclear Energy and ...
Arakawa Hiromu
Pen-name of Hiromi Arakawa (1973- ), with a vowel shift allowing this female Manga creator to appear to casual Japanese viewers to be male, presumably of some occasional value in her habitual field of Comics for boys. A high-school graduate who spent the first seven years of her adult life working on her parents' dairy farm, she moved to Tokyo in 1999 to become an art assistant to the manga ...
Zap Gun
A usually facetious term for the sf Blaster, Ray Gun or Stunner. Its first recorded appearance in print, according to the online Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction, was in an October 1934 US newspaper ad for a Buck Rogers spinoff Toy: "Buck Rogers Zap Gun 35¢". Brian W Aldiss's ...
Saxton, Josephine
(1935- ) UK author who began publishing sf with "The Wall" in Science Fantasy #78 for November 1965, and whose first three novels – The Hieros Gamos of Sam and An Smith (1969), Vector for Seven: The Weltanschaung of Mrs Amelia Mortimer and Friends [sic] (1970) and Group Feast (1971) – established her very rapidly as an inventive creator of sf ...
Chan, Grace
(? - ) Malaysian medical doctor and author, for some time resident in Australia, who began to publish work of genre interest with "The Mark" in Verge 2019: Uncanny (anth 2019) edited by Stephen Downes, Calvin Fung and Amaryllis Gacioppo. In the Dystopian Near Future Melbourne of her first novel, Every Version of You (2022), a City ...
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 ...