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Wednesday 17 August 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.
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Watson, Patrick
(1929-2022) Canadian television and radio broadcaster, director and author, active (initially as a child actor on radio) from 1943; his current affairs programme for television, This Hour Has Seven Days (1964-1966), proved too Satirical for the Canadian authorities of that time, and was cancelled for lèse majesté. The resulting scandal intensified the desire of at least one science fiction encyclopedia editor to emigrate. Of his prose works, Zero to Air Time (1975) is a thriller ...
Morley, Felix
(1894-1982) US author, brother of Christopher Morley, whose Gumption Island: A Fantasy of Co-Existence (1956) features a Russian super-Weapon which knocks some Americans on an Island back millions of years in time (see Timeslip). [JC]
Time Paradoxes
The fact that Time Travel into the past disrupts the pattern of causality, changing or cancelling matters of known fact, has not caused stories of this kind to be banished from the sf field; instead it has led to the growth of a subgenre of stories celebrating the peculiar aesthetics of such Paradoxes. The essential paradoxicality of time travel is often dramatized by asking: "What would happen if I went back in time and killed my own grandfather?" – a question to which sf writers have ...
Burke, Ralph
Pseudonym used for magazine stories 1956-1958, primarily by Robert Silverberg alone, but three times in collaboration with Randall Garrett. [JC/DRL]
Flynn, John L
(1954- ) US academic and author, mostly of nonfiction studies in sf Cinema, including Dissecting Aliens: Terror in Space (1995), on the Alien sequence of films, and War of the Worlds: From Wells to Spielberg (2005). Short fiction has been assembled in Visions in Light and Shadow (coll 2001); in his awkward first novel, The Jovian Dilemma (2006), a corrupt politician from Earth, sent to Jupiter to oversee the exploitation of desperately needed energy sources, is faced with ...
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 ...