SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 30 March 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.
Site updated on 29 March 2023
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
Brown, Eric
(1960-2023) UK author who began publishing sf – after a children's play, Noel's Ark (1982 chap) – with "Krash-Bangg Joe and the Pineal-Zen Equation" for Interzone in Autumn 1987; like several further tales assembled in The Time-Lapsed Man and Other Stories (coll 1990), it is set in a future world dominated by the effects of bio-engineering and dense with information. This marriage of Cordwainer ...
Transformers – The Movie, The
Film (1986). Sunbow/Marvel. Directed by Nelson Shin. Voices by Orson Welles, Eric Idle et al. Written by Ron Friedman. Animation by Toei Animation. 86 minutes. Colour. / This US-produced, Japanese-animated film is a spin-off from the comic-book and television series of the same name, and all are part of a gigantic marketing operation to sell the Transformers Toys: model Robots (invented ...
Poisons
Assorted deadly substances form a subset of sf Drugs but often contain little intrinsic science-fictional interest: for example, "barbitide" in Samuel R Delany's Captives of the Flame (1963 dos; rev vt Out of the Dead City 1968) has effects resembling those of conventional arsenic, while the fast-acting "Divban rabbit-venom" mentioned in Roger Zelazny's ...
Droid [2]
Also known as "{species}droid" and "{species}DROID". US electro-funk band, whose debut release The Systematik Eviloution of {species}DROID (2005) mashes genre topics into an eclectic musical hybrid of contemporary dance styles. The name is presumably based on the sf coinage Droid as popularized in Star Wars (1977). [AR]
Dingle, A E
(1879-1947) UK seaman and author, chiefly of sea stories, many published as by Captain Dingle. His pseudonyms include Brian Cotterell and, more prolifically, "Sinbad". It has been suggested that Fletcher's Island (1932; vt Sinister Eden 1934) as by Brian Cotterell is sf or supernatural, but it is in fact a detective novel in an exotic setting. As "Sinbad", he wrote two Lost World tales, Pirates May Fly (1943) and ...
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 ...