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Sunday 23 January 2022
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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Burns, Alan
(1929-2013) UK lawyer, academic and author, long resident in the USA; in the UK again after about 1980. Some of his Fabulations at novel length, such as Europe After the Rain (1965), Celebrations (1967), Babel (1969) and Dreamerika!: A Surrealist Fantasy (1972), utilize sf instruments to grapple with a surreal vision of a modern world toppling jaggedly into chaos. His techniques on occasion resemble those adopted by J G Ballard during the 1960s. / With Charles Sugnet he co-edited The ...
Long, Charles R
(1904-1978) US author whose two routine sf novels are Infinite Brain (1957) and The Eternal Man (1964). Both are filled with action, the first on a distant planet, the second on an Earth where Immortality is shared by both humans and Aliens. [JC]
Smith, D Alexander
(1953- ) US investment banker and author who served as Treasurer of Science Fiction Writers of America 1987-1990 and has written several articles on Wargame strategy. The Marathon sequence comprising Marathon (1982), Rendezvous (1988) and Homecoming (1990) analyses in some depth a First Contact event, depicting with very considerable cunning the slow process of learning and ultimate Conceptual Breakthrough attendant upon any genuine confrontation of Homo sapiens with the ...
Tex Murphy
Videogame series (from 1989). Access Software (AS). Designed by Aaron Conners, Brent Erickson, Christopher Jones. / Tex Murphy is a series of graphical Adventure games featuring the eponymous twenty-first-century private detective. The setting is a post-World War Three San Francisco, where the skies glow red with radiation and many of the inhabitants are down and out mutants. Tex, the player character, is one of the few unmutated "norms" living in the bad part of town, a kind man, but one ...
Wilcox, Don
Working name of US author Cleo Eldon Wilcox (1905-2000), who taught creative writing at Northwestern University; his claim in sf circles that his real name was Cleo Eldon Knox appears to have been fictitious. Most of his work, sometimes as Cleo Eldon (once), Miles Shelton or Max Overton (twice), was for Ray Palmer's Amazing Stories and Fantastic Adventures, where he published his first story, "The Pit of Death", in July 1939. A good and pioneering Generation-Starship tale, "The Voyage that ...
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 and one Semiprozine Hugo for his self-produced news magazine, Ansible (which see). His one ...