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Sunday 12 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.
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Puzo, Mario
(1920-1999) US author, best known for The Godfather (1969); he is of sf interest for The Fourth K (1990), a Near Future political thriller in which President Francis Xavier Kennedy takes the opportunity of the partial destruction of Manhattan (see New York) by Islamic terrorists to introduce authoritarian measures, ostensibly in order to save America. Puzo also co-wrote the screenplays for ...
Barbour, Douglas
(1940-2021) Canadian poet (author of at least fourteen volumes of poems, initially under the influence of Ezra Pound) and academic, a professor of English at the University of Alberta; his "Patterns of Meaning in the SF Novels of Ursula K. Le Guin, Joanna Russ and Samuel R. Delany, 1962-1972", accepted by Queen's University in 1976, was the first Canadian doctoral dissertation in the field of sf. A competent study of Delany was spun off from this volume: ...
Hickam, Homer H, Jr
(1943- ) US engineer for NASA and author, whose memoir/novel, Rocket Boys: A Memoir (1998; vt October Sky 1999), filmed as October Sky (1999), intensely and movingly captures the longing for space felt by young Americans (not always male), a longing composed in part of frustrated knowledge (Germany had already developed the V2) and in part through the expansionist dreams advocated in sf journals like ...
Pangborn, Edgar
(1909-1976) US composer and author, son of Georgia Wood Pangborn (1872-1958) and the brother of Mary Pangborn (1907-2003), who were both authors specializing in supernatural fiction; his publishing career began with A-100: A Mystery Story (1930) as by Bruce Harrison, and other non-genre work under various names in various magazines. Only many years later did he publish his first sf story, the famous "Angel's Egg", in Galaxy for June 1951, about a man's ...
Hawke, Simon
(1951- ) US author who first published under his birth name, Nicholas (Valentin) Yermakov, but has written as Hawke (now his legal name) since 1984. His career began with some sf adventure novels and the Boomerang series, all composed in a baroque idiom, but he soon settled into more settled pursuits, writing several unpretentious sf and fantasy series as Hawke and Military SF as by J D Masters. As Yermakov his most interesting work ...
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 ...