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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
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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 ...
Vanhee, Gregory G
(1936-1992) US author who also wrote the nonfantastic military-action Confirmed Kill series as by Mike Morris. Of sf interest are The Shooter (1988), a Paranoid thriller set in the very Near Future, and Night Strike (1990), a Technothriller involving an advanced fighter plane and the threatened End of the World. [JC]
Basu, Samit
(1979- ) Indian film-maker, Comics writer and author who began publishing with the Gamesworld Trilogy beginning with The Simoqin Prophecies (2003). The sequence is notable for its use of the topoi of Genre Fantasy [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below], reworked exuberantly through an Indian lens. It helped establish Basu as one of the leading voices ...
Frost, Conrad
(1911-2005) UK author and features editor. Sf was only a minor part of his output, which was generally confined to the 1950s. He scripted Basil Blackaller's Ace O'Hara space-adventures in the Daily Dispatch, and wrote eight Rick Random pocket Comic books for the Super Detective Library, though he was here overshadowed by Harry Harrison's five contributions. In 1956 the short-lived UK sf comic Rocket ...
Koestler, Arthur
(1905-1983) Hungarian-born linguist – he wrote in four languages – journalist, playwright and author. An early Zionist, he began publishing in Tel Aviv in 1925, but abandoned Zionism and left the Middle East by 1929; as a Jewish Communist in Berlin in the early 1930s, he was clearly at risk; he later narrowly avoided execution in the Spanish Civil War, but was admitted to the UK in 1937, becoming a naturalized UK citizen in 1948. / All Koestler's books after the famous ...
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 ...