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Friday 20 September 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.
Site updated on 17 September 2024
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Carpenter, Elmer J
(1907-1988) US author in whose Moonspin (1967) a foreign power gains control of Earth's weather, threatening to freeze the planet (see Climate Change; Weather Control); but a fight-back effort by Scientists on the Moon may save the day. An earlier novel, Nile Fever (1959), is not sf. [JC]
Storey, Anthony
(1928- ) UK author – born Anthony Story, although he and other family members mostly used the alternative spelling Storey – formerly a rugby player, and brother of the playwright and novelist David Storey (1933-2017). His Satire-drenched Messiah trilogy – comprising The Rector (1970), The Centre Holds (1973) and The Saviour (1978) – deals with the traumas surrounding the ...
Masters, Dexter
(1908-1989) US editor and author, mostly resident in the UK in later life (due to McCarthyite persecution in the 1950s), whose only sf novel was The Cloud Chamber (1971), in which World War Three drives the nations of the world Underground. As an editor, he is significant for One World or None: A Report to the Public on the Full Meaning of the Atomic Bomb (anth 1946 chap) with Katherine May, in ...
Dreyer, Hans P
(1886-1945) Norwegian-born author, in US from the early years of the century; his sf novel, The Secret of the Sphinx (1929), is a Lost Race tale set in the Himalayas. [JC]
Homeostatic Systems
An item of sf Terminology borrowed from the pre-digital-Computer era of Cybernetics. A homeostatic system is a device which automatically maintains itself in a state of equilibrium, with input and output exactly balanced, using negative feedback devices to do so. The term originally came from physiology, for the human body itself has many homeostatic systems – perhaps more simply thought of, to ...
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 ...