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Saturday 23 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.
Site updated on 18 September 2023
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Palmer, Philip
(1960- ) UK author and scriptwriter, mostly for Radio beginning with "Gin and Rum" (30 June 2000 BBC Radio 4 Afternoon Play). He began to publish his exuberant, slightly overloaded, gonzo Space Operas with Debatable Space (2008), whose double story focuses alternatively on the lengthy memoir of an Immortal woman behind the throne of her son, who had once ruled ...
Tabler, Joseph
(1949- ) US abody surfer, bookseller and author, based for all his activities in California; he ran the well-known Joseph Tabler Books in San Diego 1989-1999. Of his thrillers, three have some sf interest: Capitol Hill Clones (1981), a political Satire involving a scatty use of Clones; The Microwave Caper (1981), in which a mysterious ...
Chang Shi-Kuo
(1944- ) Chinese author and lecturer in computer science (see Computers), in Taiwan from circa 1949, in the USA from 1966 and a long-standing professor at the University of Pittsburgh. Chang was the founding editor of the academic journals Visual Languages & Computing and Software Engineering & Knowledge Engineering, co-editor of Distance Education Technologies, and effectively ...
Satire
From the earliest days of Proto SF, satire was its prevailing mode, and this inheritance was evident even after sf proper began in the nineteenth century. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines satire as literary work "in which prevailing vices or follies are held up to ridicule". Proto sf is seldom interested in imagining the societies of other worlds or future times for their own sake; most proto sf of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (by, ...
Star Trek Games
The popularity of Star Trek throughout the 1970s and 1980s led to the creation of a number of games which either had a notable effect on the evolution of their particular form or exerted some influence on the development of the franchise as a whole. Perhaps the most significant were the earliest, the various freely distributed unauthorized Computer Wargames which appeared on academic mainframes during the 1970s, and may have ...
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 ...