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Wednesday 29 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.
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MacLeod, Ken
(1954- ) Scottish author who began publishing work of genre interest with The Star Fraction (1995). This was the first novel in the four-volume Fall Revolution sequence, which also included The Stone Canal (1996), The Cassini Division (1998), and The Sky Road (1999). Together, these books comprise one of the fullest and most thoughtful stagings of political (see Politics) debates in sf. Although MacLeod is avowedly socialist, he is also visibly sympathetic to other points ...
Wheeler, Harriet
(1858-1924) US author whose The Woman in Stone (1903) presents elegiacally, though not without convinced Christian condescension, the declining culture of the Ojibwe nation of Native Americans through a tale in which the discovery of the petrified body of a woman from ancient times opens into the description of a doomed Lost Race. [JC]
Barbour, Douglas
(1940-2021) Canadian poet (author of at least fourteen volumes of poems, initially under the influence of Ezra Pound) and academic, a professor of English at the University of Alberta; his "Patterns of Meaning in the SF Novels of Ursula K. Le Guin, Joanna Russ and Samuel R. Delany, 1962-1972", accepted by Queen's University in 1976, was the first Canadian doctoral dissertation in the field of sf. A competent study of Delany was spun off from this volume: Worlds Out of Words: The SF Novels of ...
Ward, Herbert D
(1861-1932) US author, most of whose short stories of sf interest were political dramas whose venues were only marginally displaced from late-nineteenth-century America, even though some of the tales assembled in A Republic Without a President, and Other Stories (coll dated 1891 but 1893) were ostensibly set a century hence. The White Crown, and Other Stories (coll 1894) continued in the same vein, though the title story itself is a Future-War tale of some interest. Master of the Magicians ...
Disraeli, Benjamin
(1804-1881) UK politician and author born Benjamin D'Israeli, Conservative Member of Parliament from 1837 and – in 1868 and 1874-1880 – Prime Minister. In his almost-forgotten youthful Fantastic Voyage, The Voyage of Captain Popanilla (1828) published anonymously, the eponymous captain, who is an innocent savage from a prelapsarian (ie pre-missionary) South Seas Utopia, voyages to the land of Vraibleusia, which pejoratively resembles England, and whose capital Hubbabub clearly guys ...
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 ...