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Saturday 22 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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Fort, Charles
(1874-1932) US journalist and author whose first work, The Outcast Manufacturers (1909), is a novel only remotely connected to his later interests. He also wrote numerous usually realistic, and often humorous, short stories including a satirical fantasy, "A Radical Corpuscle" (March 1906 Tom Watson's Magazine), before settling into the work for which he is remembered. Working from extensive notes collected mainly from newspapers, magazines and scientific journals, Fort compiled a series of ...
Warner, Rex
Working name of UK author and translator Reginald Ernest Warner (1905-1986) who remains best known for his earliest novels for adults, The Wild Goose Chase (1937), The Professor (1938) and The Aerodrome: A Love Story (1941), political allegories some of whose devices evoke the Kafka-esque side of sf (see Absurdist SF; Fabulation). In The Wild Goose Chase, three brothers cycle into a strange country in search of the eponymous goose, a quest which immerses them in a surreal bureaucracy much ...
Riviere, Sam
(1981- ) UK teacher, publisher, poet and author, active as a poet from around 2005. He is of some sf interest for his first novel, Dead Souls (2021), a Satirical tale about poets and poetry whose intensely prolonged monologues perhaps benefit from their exposure to a modestly changed very Near Future world (see Fantastika). In the course of this a poet – accustomed to anxious channelling of his elders but now "outed" by QACS, a Computer system clearly capable of ...
Holocaust Fiction
The term Holocaust is used in this encyclopedia to designate the fictionally popular variety of catastrophe which is directly caused by human or occasionally Alien action, intentional or otherwise. It is not normally here used to refer to the Holocaust, which is generally understood to refer to Germany's attempted extermination of the Jews of Europe (along with Slavs, gypsies, mental "defectives", etc) during World War Two, a sustained and maniacally well-organized programme of genocide that ...
Fuller, Thomas E
(1948-2002) US actor, playwright and author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Dancer in the Dark: Interlude Three" in When the Black Lotus Blooms (anth 1990) edited by Elizabeth A Saunders; after some fantasies for younger children with Brad Strickland, wrote, also with Strickland, the Young Adult Mars Year One sequence, comprising Mars Year One: Marooned! (2004), Mars Year One: Missing! (2004) and Mars Year One: Marsquake (2005), set in an experimental Keep on Mars, designed to ...
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 ...