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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.
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Lift, De
Film (1983; vt The Lift). Sigma Films. Directed by Dick Maas. Written by Mass; music by Maas. Cast includes Huub Stapel and Willeke Van Ammelrooy. 99 minutes. Colour. / This neat Dutch Horror film with an sf rationale, dubbed atrociously into English, tells of a homicidal lift (elevator) in a high-rise office building. The lift is controlled by an organic, living Computer (biochip), manufactured in Japan, which ...
Fowles, John
(1926-2005) UK author who remains perhaps most famous for his first and third novels, The Collector (1963) and The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969). His second novel, The Magus (1965; rev 1977), especially in the conciser revised version, more powerfully explores the labyrinths of obsession and manipulation underlying, in all of Fowles's work, the rigmaroles and impostures of daylight reality. In this novel a series of seemingly supernatural ...
Mayr, Suzette
(1967- ) Canadian academic and author whose third novel, Venous Hum (2004), is a gonzo Near Future Satire on Identity issues, Sex, Gender, suburbia and the conventions governing the kind of horror novel now described as Urban Fantasy (not the same category as the principal definition of the term in The ...
Hubble, Nick
(1965- ) UK academic and author whose earlier work did not focus on Fantastika narrowly conceived, though Mass Observation and Everyday Life: Culture, History, Theory (2005) and The Proletarian Answer to the Modernist Question (2017) [neither listed below] very usefully explore the 1930s world. The Science Fiction Handbook (anth 2013) with Aris Mousoutzanis, a conspectus on the field, maintains a ...
Poetry
The past century or so, as the SF Megatext began to form, was a period not markedly friendly to narrative verse in general, and good sf narratives in verse during this period are unsurprisingly not often found. Examples of lyric sf poetry – short poems in which sf tropes and topoi expectably uncover the state of mind of the poet – are much more common, though few of these rank very high in the literatures of the West. When identifiable sf "moves" can ...
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 ...