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Wednesday 15 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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Ransome, Arthur
(1884-1967) UK journalist and author, active during World War One as a British secret agent working for MI6 in Russia while publicly supporting the Bolsheviks, before and after they came to power in 1917; his nonfiction Six Weeks in Russia in 1919 (1919) does not hint at any such involvement. He remains very much best known for his nonfantastic Swallows and Amazons series of children's books set initially in the Lake District, whose sixth ...
New Weird
Term apparently coined by M John Harrison in his introduction to China Miéville's The Tain (2002 chap), titled "China Miéville and the New Weird". It was taken up by Miéville himself in a guest editorial for The Third Alternative (Summer 2003), describing that magazine's general ambience but later understood as a supposed subgenre whose ...
Payne, Bernal C, Jr
(1941- ) US author the protagonists of whose Time Travel novel for Young Adult readers, It's About Time (1984; vt Trapped in Time 1986), travels back to 1955 where they meet their parents as teenagers. The future children of their marriage must ensure it takes place. The slightly later Back to the Future, released 1985, was conceived ...
Bowers, John
(? - ) US author, most of whose Westerns have been Space Operas, all assembled in series; the first of these is The Fighter Queen Saga beginning with A Vow to Sophia (2009). The most sustained is the Nick Walker, United Federation Marshall sequence beginning with Sirian Summer (2011), a Planetary Romance set on the ...
Palmer, Dexter
(1974- ) US author whose first novel, The Dream of Perpetual Motion (2010), a Steampunk tale set in an Alternate World version of America where the protagonist, enduring luxurious imprisonment in a zeppelin floating above a fantasticated City while remembering – in something like a dream state – his beloved Miranda and her father Prospero, the latter ...
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 ...