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Friday 29 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 25 September 2023
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Bluejay Books
US publishing house founded by James R Frenkel, who had previously been the editor of Dell's sf line. Bluejay Books began publishing in 1983, its books being distributed by St Martin's Press. Among its titles were Gardner Dozois's best-of-the-year anthologies (see Anthologies), books by Frenkel's wife Joan D Vinge, Dan ...
Apple, A E
(1891-1963) US author of ramshackle crime thrillers, mostly at shorter lengths for Detective Story Magazine; these stories include a series featuring the Chinese Villain Mr Chang, something of a Yellow Peril figure though hardly in the Fu Manchu class. In the novel Mr Chang's Crime Ray: A Detective Story (9 April 1927 Detective Story Magazine; fixup 1928), Chang is ...
Yeats, William Butler
(1865-1939) Irish playwright and poet, active from 1885, one of the two or three most significant twentieth century poets to write in English, winner of the Nobel Prize in 1923. Unlike his close contemporary Wyndham Lewis, he was relatively immune to the kind of early twentieth century modernism sympathetic to pre-World War One Futurist epiphanies of the Machine (see ...
Holmes, Clara H
(? -? ) US author whose collection, Floating Fancies Among the Weird and the Occult (coll 1898), contains a Lost Race tale, "Nordhung Nordjansen", whose sea-captain protagonist guides his ship to the North Pole, which is indeed a magnetic pole; from there, he is cast into a Hollow Earth as described by John Cleves Symmes, whose "mist being" ...
Martin, George R R
(1948- ) US editor and author whose career can be divided into four overlapping parts, in more or less chronological order: as a writer of sf; as a writer and producer for television; as an editor of original Anthologies; and as a dominant creator of dynasty fantasy. He began to publish work of genre interest with "The Hero" in Galaxy for February 1971, and his success was thereafter rapid. "A Song for Lya" (June ...
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 ...