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Monday 9 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.
Site updated on 2 December 2024
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Fontenelle, Bernard le Bovyer de
(1657-1757) French man of letters whose work pointed forward to the Age of Reason; nephew of the dramatist Pierre Corneille (1606-1684). He wrote much, and one of his most important books became a seminal influence on Proto SF: Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes habités (1686; exp 1687; trans Sir W D Knight as A Discourse on the Plurality of Worlds 1687; new trans Aphra Behn as ...
Simon, Francesca
(1955- ) US-born author, in UK from early adulthood; she initially concentrated on books for younger children, like the Horrid Henry sequence beginning with Horrid Henry and the Mega-Mean Time Machine (2012), but is of more direct interest for the sharply Equipoisal Norse Gods sequence comprising Sleeping Army (2011) and The Lost Gods (2014), set in an ...
Tatăr, Doru
(1956- ) Romanian civil engineer and author in whose sf novel, Prioritate Zero (1990; trans Raymond Humphreys and Petru Iamandi as Top Priority 2011), a tale of Cosmology in which the implosion into the universe of a vast Black Hole leads to a human/Alien interaction whose outcome is likely to generate a something like a new ...
Hallums, James R
(? - ) UK author of whom nothing is known beyond his authorship of the unremarkable They Came, They Saw (1965), set in a 1979 world menaced by the threat of Invasion. [JC]
Comic Inferno
A more or less self-explanatory item of Terminology coined by Kingsley Amis in New Maps of Hell: A Survey of Science Fiction (1960), describing sf which cheerfully extracts Satire or outright black Humour from a scenario rooted in Dystopia. Examples cited by Amis include Anthony Boucher's ...
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 ...