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Tuesday 8 October 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 7 October 2024
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Coover, Robert
(1932-2024) US author who established a considerable reputation with his novels, in which Fabulation and political scatology mix fruitfully. His work could be seen to represent a Postmodernist intensification of the same milieu excoriated by Richard Condon; at times both authors seem to be describing a nightmare dream of orgy-choked life in the Late Roman Empire (see ...
Mad Max 2
Film (1981; vt The Road Warrior). Kennedy Miller Entertainment. Directed by George Miller. Written by Terry Hayes, Miller, Brian Hannant. Cast includes Mel Gibson, Emil Minty, Kjell Nilsson, Mike Preston and Bruce Spence. 96 minutes. Colour. / The success of the first film in this series, Mad Max (1979), generated a bigger budget for this, the second. It was well used, and this is a more sophisticated film, ...
Mars, Alastair
(1915-1985) Canadian-born soldier and author, in the UK from infancy, in the Navy from 1932; he became well known for the 1952 court martial that ended his military career (in the midst of a dispute regarding his penury at naval rates of pay, he had refused to report for duty); his last rank was lieutenant commander. After 1952, he published several novels that drew on his intimate knowledge of submarines at war Under the Sea (he had been commander of ...
Eve of Destruction
Film (1991). Orion. Directed by Duncan Gibbons. Written by Gibbons, Yale Udoff. Cast includes Gregory Hines and Renee Soutendijk. 98 minutes. Colour. / Soutendijk is good, both as Eve, a Defense Department scientist, and as Eve VIII, the military Robot that she creates in her own image. Armed with endless firepower and a nuclear bomb, the robot destroys the men Eve secretly hates, several male chauvinists and the police who try to stop her. Some critics ...
Basile, Gloria Vitanza
(1929-2004) US author, usually of romantic thrillers, whose Global 2000 sequence beginning with Eye of the Eagle (1983) describes a Near Future nuclear World War Three which obliterates the Middle East; earlier volumes provide a convoluted back-story to explain the war, as well as carrying the plot forward, into a time when further conspiracies must be crushed. [JC]
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 ...