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Friday 1 July 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.
Site updated on 27 June 2022
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Disch, Thomas M
(1940-2008) US author, raised in Minnesota but for many years intermittently resident in New York where, before becoming a full-time writer in the mid-1960s, he worked in an advertising agency and in a bank; he subsequently lived (and set several tales) in the UK, Turkey, Italy and Mexico, before returning to Manhattan, where much of his significant work is set; he was the partner of Charles Naylor from 1969 until the latter's death in 2005. Disch began publishing sf with "The Double-Timer" for ...
Mitchell, George Dean
(1894-1961) Australian soldier and author whose The Awakening (1937), a Future War tale about the Invasion of Australia, was written as a Dreadful Warning, and as a kind of manual for soldiers facing the future. [JC]
Æ
Pseudonym, often printed as A E or AE, used by the Irish poet George William Russell (1867-1935) for all his writing. In 1886 he and William Butler Yeats helped found the Dublin Lodge of the Theosophical Society (see Theosophy) and much of his work reflects a mystical agenda – not very coherently in the supernatural tales assembled in The Mask of Apollo, and Other Stories (coll 1904), but with very much more force in The Interpreters (1922), set in a great City in the indeterminate future ...
Macpherson, Ian
(1905-1944) Scots author, farmer and broadcaster who is of genre interest for his last novel, Wild Harbour (1936), in which a devastating Future War – the expected World War Two – breaks out in 1944. The story centres on a married couple who flee to a cave in the hills of Speyside to escape the looming threat of bombs, Biological Weapons and Poison gas, a temporary escape which though intermittently idyllic cannot endure. Eventually the Post-Holocaust world closes in. [DRL]
Widnall, Samuel Page
(1827-1894) UK publisher and author, owner of The Old Vicarage at Grantchester from 1850, adding a Folly, and an artificial island in the River Cam which still exists; it was briefly and famously the home of Rupert Brooke (1887-1915), and later on of Jeffrey Archer. From the Vicarage, Widnall published several books from 1871, including A Mystery of Sixty Centuries; Or, a Modern St George and the Dragon (1889), which depicts the discover of a Lost Race of pre-Adamites in an African valley, who ...
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 ...