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Thursday 7 July 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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Ellis, Mark
(? - ) US publisher and author much of whose creative work – since beginning his career in the 1980s with storylines for Star Rangers and other Comics – has been tied closely to visual projects, including Graphic Novels such as H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu: The Whisperer in Darkness (1991-1992 H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu: The Whisperer in Darkness; 1993). He is of sf interest initially for his creation of and contributions to the long Outlanders ...
Eliade, Mircea
(1907-1986) Romanian academic, in UK, Portugal and France from 1940, resident in the US from 1956, most famous as a philosopher of comparative religion [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below], though he was a prolific author of fiction, much of it fantastic, from the publication of his first, precocious tale, "Cum am găsit piatr filosofală" ["How I found the Philosopher's Stone"] (1921 Ziarul Stiintelor Populare si al Calatorilor), until the beginning of the 1980s; much ...
Anderson, Michael
(1920-2018) UK-born film director, in Canada from 1981, whose career in Cinema began in 1936 as an office boy at the Elstree studios; his first great success, and perhaps his best known movie, was the World War Two adventure The Dam Busters (1955). Productions of genre interest include Vice Versa (1948), directed by Peter Ustinov (1921-2004) with Anderson as assistant director, which is based on the Identity-Exchange comedy Vice Versâ, or A Lesson to Fathers (1882; rev 1883) by F Anstey; ...
Miller, Walter M, Jr
(1923-1996) US author who before beginning to publish served in World War Two as a pilot, flying combat missions; he then converted to Catholicism, in 1947. Miller began publishing sf with "Secret of the Death Dome" in Amazing in 1951, and over the ten years of his active writing career released about forty more tales, many of which had a deep impact upon the field. During the 1950s, a time when US sf tended to express its new-found interest in character through stories whose rigid formulae ...
Shiel, M P
(1865-1947) Montserrat-born author with his surname given as Shiell, in the UK from around 1883. He began writing fiction in the late 1880s and continued intermittently until his death, his first work of genre interest being "Huguenin's Wife" for Pall Mall Magazine in April 1895; most of his short fiction of fantastic interest was published 1896-1901. Shiel was intensely concerned with style per se, incorporating poetic techniques into narrative prose; he also used sensational adventure fiction ...
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 ...