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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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Campion, Sarah
Pseudonym of UK-born teacher, journalist and author Mary Rose Coulton (1906-2002), author of Father: A Portrait of G G Coulton (1948), an impressive biography of her father George Gordon Coulton (1858-1947), the important medieval scholar who also wrote Friar's Lantern (1906), a Timeslip fantasy. Her fourth novel, Thirty Million Gas Masks (1936), is a Near Future tale predictive of the coming ...
Pall Mall Budget, The
UK magazine, edited by C Lewis Hind and others. Weekly, 3 October 1868 to 27 December 1894; later incorporated into The New Budget. Pall Mall Budget, nominally a weekly digest of newspaper articles from the Pall Mall Gazette, had negligible sf content until C Lewis Hind, himself a minor fantasy author, persuaded H G Wells to write a series of short stories. These appeared in 1894 under the general heading "Single Sitting Stories" and were ...
Killus, James P
(1950-2008) US chemist and author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Son of ETAOIN SHRDLU: More Adventures in Type and Space" for Asimov's with Sharon N Farber, Susanna Jacobson and Dave Stout in June 1981, publishing about twenty stories in all, most of them more ambitious than this initial vignette. His first novel, Book of Shadows (1983), is fantasy; his second, Sunsmoke (1985), undemandingly combines sf and fantasy in a ...
Curtis Warren
Founded in 1948, one of several UK publishing firms which flourished in the decade after World War Two by releasing dozens of purpose-written paperback originals in various popular genres. Before it foundered in 1954, Curtis Warren had published over 500 novels, 98 of them sf, all of them composed strictly according to length restrictions: in 1948-1950, Curtis Warren books were of 24 or 32 pages; in 1950-1953, they were of 112 or 128 pages; from 1953, 160-page volumes were the rule. Curtis ...
Falkner, John
Pseudonym used by UK author Ernest John Gale (1917-1976) for two routine sf adventures, Untrodden Streets of Time (1954) – featuring Time Travel to the future – and Overlords of Andromeda (1955), a Space Opera featuring human revolt against the titular Aliens. [JC/DRL]
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 ...