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Monday 27 June 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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Crawford, Theron Clark
(1849-1925) US entrepreneur (involved with various Buffalo Bill enterprises), journalist and (apparently) Theosophist (see Theosophy), active circa 1885-1925; from about 1898 he was based mainly in London. The protagonist of A Man and His Soul: An Occult Romance of Washington Life (1894) finds himself semi-occultly able to glimpse the future of America, a quasi-Utopia dominated by advances in technology. The title story assembled in The Disappearance Syndicate; And, Senator Stanley's Story ...
Bell, Anthea
(1936-2018) UK translator from the French, German and Danish; perhaps best known for her idiomatic versions of the Asterix Comics mostly written by René Goscinny (1926-1977); the unceasing flow of puns throughout the thirty-five volumes released before her retirement in 2013 are almost always hers. Her translations of the work of W G Sebald (1944-2001), most notably of his penetrating Austerlitz (2001), transparently demonstrate how closely his understanding of the fate of the modern ...
Flytrap
US Amateur Magazine published and edited by Tim Pratt and Heather Shaw from Oakland, California, via the Tropism Press imprint in US quarto format, usually around 40 pages. It was started simply for fun, with a main run of ten issues, usually two per year tied in with one or another sf Convention (where most of its 200 or so sales were made), from November 2003 to November 2008. Several years elapsed before a further issue appeared: #11 dated March 2014. / Besides a regular column by Nick ...
Martini, Virgilio
(1903-1986) Italian author whose sf novel, Il monde senza donne: Romanzo (1936 as by Virgilio Letrusco; trans Emile Capouya as The World Without Women 1971), enjoyed (at least in hindsight) the honour of being banned by Mussolini. The tale depicts the experiences of the last woman on earth (see Feminism; Gender; Women in SF), after a homosexual plot to free the world of women almost succeeds; her understanding of what has happened, and of the sexual expectations (see Sex) of the male ...
de Camp, Catherine Crook
(1907-2000) US author, married to L Sprague de Camp from 1939 until her death, and who served as his manager and accountant from the beginning of their partnership; additionally, over and above their several registered collaborations, she worked with her husband on many works released by publishers as by him alone, a lifetime collaboration he in fact openly acknowledged. The Raymond Z Gallun Award, for "outstanding contributions to the genre of science fiction", was presented to both authors in ...
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 ...