SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 27 June 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 20 June 2022
Sponsor of the day: John W. Knott Bookseller LLC
Worts, George F
(1892-1967) US author who also wrote as by Loring Brent, not always restricting his use of this name to magazine publications. The Peter the Brazen sequence, whose protagonist boasts uncanny hearing and other Superpower-like abilities, is set primarily in the Far East, where Yellow Peril menaces are routinely dealt with by the Hero. The series appeared initially in Argosy between 1918-1934; the first six (all from 1918) were spliced together as Peter the Brazen: A Mystery Story of Modern China ...
Hopkins, Alice K
(1839-? ) US author whose two novels of interest veer dangerously close to occultism, though each features a Lost Race. They are A Daughter of the Druids (1892) as by A K H and Mona the Druidess; Or, the Astral Science of Old Britain (1904); in each case the lost race boasts a woman of power. [JC]
Optimism and Pessimism
In the most simplistic version of the History of SF, sf was always (and rightly) an optimistic literature until the New Wave came along in the 1960s and spoiled everything. This was at best a very partial truth, being only remotely applicable to Genre SF and not at all to Mainstream sf. / In the mainstream, not even the work of individual authors could be categorized as simply either optimistic or pessimistic. Both Jules Verne and H G Wells took a darker view of the future as they became ...
Davenport, Basil
(1905-1966) US academic and anthologist. His connection with sf began with An Introduction to Islandia [for subtitle see Checklist] (1942 chap), a book about Islandia (1942) by Austin Tappan Wright; his introduction to Stephen Vincent Benét for that author's Selected Works (coll 1942 2vols) is strong and sympathetic. Then came a short critical and historical study, Inquiry into Science Fiction (1955 chap). Describing himself as a "toastmaster", Davenport also introduced (though Earl Kemp ...
SF in the Classroom
In September 1953 Sam Moskowitz began to teach what was almost certainly the first sf course in the USA to be given through a college. The course was on Science Fiction Writing, was delivered on a non-credit basis through the City College of New York, and was presented with the collaboration of a popular-science writer, Robert Frazier (not to be confused with the sf poet Robert Frazier). For the Autumn 1953 sessions, Moskowitz arranged for several sf writers – including Isaac Asimov, ...
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 ...