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Saturday 14 December 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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Dream Hacking
Term used in this encyclopedia for the now frequent sf trope in which entry is made into someone's personal dreams or mental landscape (as though this literal Inner Space were a physical geography or Pocket Universe) to study or influence the contents. This has long been imagined as an intriguing technique of future Psychology. / A pioneering sf example is Peter ...
Glaser, Milton
(1929-2020) US graphic designer and typeface designer who co-founded Push Pin Studios in 1954 and set up his own design company Milton Glaser Inc in 1974. His work includes more than 400 posters, New York's iconic logo I ♥ NY (1977) and the "bullet" logo used by DC Comics from 1977 to 2005. Glaser's often deceptively simple but always striking book cover designs appeared on a number of titles of genre interest, including Clifton ...
Hodder-Williams, Christopher
(1926-1995) UK author, pilot, composer and sound engineer; a member of the family which owned and managed his main early publisher. His first novel, The Cummings Report (1957) as by James Brogan, was not sf. Hodder-Williams began publishing sf with Chain Reaction (1959), which concerns itself, as does almost all of his fiction, with the relationship between Man and the machine Technology he has created, in this case through a mystery ...
Reverie, Reginald
Pseudonym of US author Grenville Mellen (1799-1841), whose extremely early volume of short stories, Sad Tales and Glad Tales (coll 1828), has been claimed as a shaping influence upon Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe. Of sf interest in the collection is a Satire, "The Meeting of the Planets", in which the planets talk among themselves about Homo sapiens; and "The ...
Knight, Norman L
(1895-1972) US author and pesticide chemist for the Department of Agriculture until his retirement in 1963. He was not a prolific writer, publishing only 11 stories altogether, the first of which was the serialized novella "Frontier of the Unknown" for Astounding in July and August 1937. He made his main contribution by collaborating with James Blish on A Torrent of Faces (1967). This novel – whose ...
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 ...