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Friday 13 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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Sayre, David
Working name of US engineer and author David Sayre Dayton (? - ) whose sf novel, The Great Improbability: An Autobiographical Mystery by the People of Earth (2010), a disquisitional tale, sufficiently personalized to count as fiction, in which six representative humans describe the enlightened future (see Utopia) they, lovingly, inhabit. He should not be confused with the American crystallographer David Sayre ...
Shaw, George Bernard
(1856-1950) Irish-born playwright, critic and author, in the UK from 1876, where he remained ferociously active throughout a writing career lasting almost seventy-five years (see Longevity in Writers); though often referred to as GBS, he increasingly wrote as Bernard Shaw. Under whatever form of his name, he was central to the Fabian Society from its founding in 1884, editing Fabian Essays (anth 1889) and beginning contentious intellectual ...
McElhiney, Gaile Churchill
(1888-1978) US author of a Lost Race novel, Into the Dawn (1945), in which a pilot discovers a hidden Island in the South Pacific housing descendants of lost Lemuria who have here created, with the aid of advances in Technology, a spiritually elevated Utopia. [JC]
Rakoff, Alvin
(1927-2024) Canadian film and television director, and latterly author, active from around 1950, almost exclusively in the UK from 1953. His first career, which focused on producing/directing single plays mostly for Television, with about 100 credits to his name, had waned by around 2000, a point when that format was no longer supported by the industry. He is of some sf interest for his last novel, The Seven Einsteins ...
Timmons, Stan
(1966- ) US author, chiefly of Ties, who began to publish work of genre interest with "Life Is But a Dream" in the Marvel Universe Superhero anthology The Ultimate X-Men (anth 1996) edited by Stan Lee. His first novel was the Heavy Metal-related Heavy Metal F.A.K.K.2. (1999) with Kevin Eastman. A solo venture is ...
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 ...