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Thursday 6 October 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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Scrymsour, Ella M
Working name of Ella Mary Scrymsour-Nichol (1888-1962), UK actress and author, daughter-in-law of C A Scrymsour Nichol; her sf novel, The Perfect World: A Romance of Strange People and Strange Places (fixup 1922), is thought by E F Bleiler almost certainly to consist of two separate magazine novels here published sequentially; however, as Scrymsour clearly attempted to weave their plots together, we designate the outcome a Fixup. In the first main sequence the two young gentlemen protagonists ...
Cameron, James
(1954- ) Canadian-born film-maker. Originally a special-effects man and art director with Roger Corman's New World – where he worked on Battle beyond the Stars (1980), Android (1982) and several others including Escape from New York (1981), for which New World did the special effects – Cameron made an inauspicious debut as director with Piranha II: Flying Killers (1981; vt Piranha II: The Spawning) (see Piranha); Cameron was removed from the film and his own ...
Kim, Un-Su
(1972- ) South Korean author whose first novel Kaebinit (2006; trans Sean Lin Halbert as The Cabinet 2021), deftly Equipoises a Satirical portrait of a late capitalist world in which humans are rigorously defined by surrealistically reductive labels (see Absurdist SF) against an subtextual implication that a Genetic Engineering project (see Eugenics) underlies the patent humiliation of Homo sapiens. / The protagonist of Kim's second novel, Seolgyejadeul (2010; trans ...
King, T Jackson
(1948- ) US archaeologist and author, formerly married to Paula E Downing. He began publishing sf with his first novel, Retread Shop (1988), a somewhat congested but pleasingly vivid tale of the upbringing of a young human in the Space Habitat of the title, and of his complicated dealings with Alien merchants and crises of various sorts. He then focused on short stories for much of the 1990s, many of them extrapolating the concerns of Anthropology into various venues, ...
Nanovic, John L
(1906-2001) Austro-Hungarian-born US editor and author, in the USA from early childhood; Sam Moskowitz, in "Me and My Shadow" (May 1990 Pulp Vault #7), records an interview with Nanovic in which he claims to have been born in Palmerton, Pennsylvania on 7 October 1907. From 1931 he was associated with Street & Smith, for whom he edited The Shadow from 1932 to 1943 (see The Shadow); and was also involved in developing the figure of Doc Savage for the firm, writing the initial treatment which ...
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 ...