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Saturday 12 October 2024
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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Coover, Robert
(1932-2024) US author who established a considerable reputation with his novels, in which Fabulation and political scatology mix fruitfully. His work could be seen to represent a Postmodernist intensification of the same milieu excoriated by Richard Condon; at times both authors seem to be describing a nightmare dream of orgy-choked life in the Late Roman Empire (see ...
Hesky, Olga
(1912-1974) UK editor and author in whose wry and somewhat Surrealist sf novel, The Purple Armchair (1961), the Alien who resembles an armchair and is purple must decide whether or not the human race – caught in a near-future Dystopia dominated by Computers – should survive. Eventually the "chair" says no. [JC]
Johannesson, Olof
Pseudonym of Swedish plasma physicist and author Hannes Olof Gosta Alfvén (1908-1995), winner of the 1970 Nobel Prize for Physics, which may have surprised some of his more conventional colleagues as he had been for many years thought of as a maverick. His Scientific Romance, Sagan om den stora datamaskinen (1966; trans Naomi Walford as The Big Computer: A Vision ...
Joscelyne, Cyril
(1891-1934) UK author whose sf novel, When Gubbins Ruled (1925 chap), treats the revolutionary Near Future election as premier of the UK of a member of the working class as properly subject to a Satirical approach. [JC]
Cobban, J MacLaren
(1849-1903) UK author, of some interest for Master of His Fate (October-December 1889 Blackwood's Magazine; 1890), whose protagonist, tortured by the need vampirically to drain the life energy of others to maintain his own Immortality, confesses all to an expert in the field of animal magnetism; and then – convulsively aged into an old man, as always happens before he feeds – kills himself. The Tyrants of Kool-Sim ...
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 ...