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Friday 22 September 2023
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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Starzl, R F
(1899-1976) US journalist and author who between 1928 and 1934 had 24 stories published in the Pulp magazines, written primarily as a means of financing his family newspaper, the LeMars Globe-Post, of which he became the proprietor. Most of Starzl's stories are competently written but became increasingly formulaic, though he was especially good at creating different types of Monsters. His first story is his best remembered, "Out of ...
Byrne, Brendan C
(1982- ) US author who first began publishing work of genre interest with "Donald Asshole and Los Elementos de Rock" (Spring/Summer 2008 Flurb), followed by "Wasps/Spiders" (Fall/Winter 2010 Flurb), both published in a journal mentored and shaped by Rudy Rucker. A novella, The Showing of the Instruments (2011), and "Human Child" (2014 Flapperhouse) are tales of ...
Ryves, T E
(1895-1976) India-born UK surgeon, poet and author in whose Bandersnatch (1950) an adventurer travels – or is transported – into a future dominated by a highly mechanized scientific establishment, and by the bandersnatch of scientism – mad, ungainly, as relentless as in Lewis Carroll – to which they give allegiance. Fortunately, he escapes this Dystopia. [JC]
Pax Aeronautica
The sense that air Transportation must dramatically change the tactics and strategy of Future War was articulated in the eighteenth century by Samuel Johnson in his Proto SF Rasselas (1759): / Against an army sailing through the clouds neither walls, nor mountains, nor seas, could afford any security ... Even this valley, the retreat of ...
Rutherford, Meg
(1932-2006) Australian sculptor, illustrator and author, in UK at least intermittently from 1958; she is of some sf interest for The Beautiful Island (graph 1969), which is collage-based. The narrative is ostensibly pure fantasy – birds persuade the battered houses and edifices of northern lands to migrate south to a paradisal Island – but uses proto-Steampunk devices literally to carry the tale, for the ...
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 ...