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Wednesday 11 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.
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Howells, William Dean
(1837-1920) US author, best known for his many realist novels from 1870 onwards, and for his fairly numerous stories, several of them fantastic, like "Christmas Every Day" (January 1886 St Nicholas Magazine), a Time-Loop tale that Danny Rubin – scriptwriter for Groundhog Day (1993) – claimed was his only inspiration for that film. Some of Howells's tales of interest were assembled in ...
Jackson, Charles Loring
(1847-1935) US chemist, influential academic and author, whose The Gold Point and Other Strange Stories (coll 1926) contains several sf tales, including "The Cube", about an amoeba-like Monster capable of imitating human form and Identity Transfer, and "An Undiscovered Island in the Far Sea", in which two strange interrelated intelligent species are discovered on a Pacific Island. ...
Sarban
Pseudonym of UK author John W Wall (1910-1989), a career diplomat for the UK from 1933 until his retirement in 1966. Most of the short stories assembled in Ringstones, and Other Curious Tales (coll 1951) and The Doll Maker, and Other Tales of the Uncanny (coll 1953) [for vts see Checklist] are fantasy, but the haunting and nightmarish The Sound of His Horn (1952) has often been conscripted to the sf ranks by sf critics, for it is partially set in an ...
Garland, Alex
(1970- ) UK screenwriter, Videogame writer, director and author, son of the political cartoonist Nicholas Garland (1935- ). His first works of interest were fiction, beginning with The Beach (1996), a tale inconclusively understandable as an exercise in implied Fantastika: its protagonists, having been given a map to an unknown Pacific Island, find ...
Tyler, Theodore
Pseudonym of US author Edward William Ziegler (1930-1993) for The Man Whose Name Wouldn't Fit; Or, the Case of Cartwright-Chickering (1968), a Satire set in a Near Future Dystopia; the action revolves around a Computer's inability to process the protagonist's full name, Arthur Duane Cartwright-Chickering, causing him to be fired. [JC]
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 ...