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Sunday 22 June 2025
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Forsyth, Frederick
(1938-2025) UK author who gained fame with his first novel, The Day of the Jackal (1971), and whose books are generally political thrillers. The Shepherd (1975 chap), however, is a sentimental Timeslip or ghost fantasy in which a pilot on Christmas Eve 1957 is saved from crashing by a World War Two pilot in an antique bomber: pilot and plane had been shot down on the Christmas Eve of 1943. ...
Mandeville, Colin
Pseudonym used by UK economist and author Anthony Dalston Dawson (1927- ) for his novel, The Last Days of New York (1980), in which unbalanced speculative profligacy (see Economics) sufficiently undermines New York for the city to collapse. [JC]
Space Detective
US Comic (1951-1952). Four issues. Avon Periodicals, Inc (see Avon Comics). Artists include Tex Blaisdell, Gene Fawcette, Joe Orlando and Wally Wood. Writers of scripts include Walter Gibson. Each issue has four comic strips, plus one or two short text stories (except #2). / Wealthy young philanthropist Rod Hathway's hobby is "relieving the miseries of the poor", but he also has a secret identity: ...
Cowan, James
(1841-1906) US author and journalist whose sf novel, Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World (1896), features an ambulatory Moon which after falling into the Pacific Ocean makes it possible for the narrator of the tale, with companions, to fly to Mars in a Balloon, where they discover a new defence of Christianity in the form of parallel Evolution and multiple incarnations of ...
Okri, Ben
(1959- ) Nigerian journalist and author mostly in UK from 1978, active from the mid 1970s. Most of his novels, beginning with Flowers and Shadows (1980) and including his best known title, The Famished Road (1991), fit loosely into an understanding of Fantastika less focused on its transgressiveness within an anglophone context, than upon a sense that his work does not visibly struggle against imposed conventions ...
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 ...