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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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Broun, Bill
(? - ) US journalist, editor and author whose first novel, Night of the Animals (2016), is set in a Near Future Dystopian London which has suffered most of the ills the twenty-first century has been able to inflict by the year 2052: demoralized by top-down economic paralysis, trapped in a surveillance-obsessed spam-choked Media Landscape that a weak (but tyrannical) monarchy cannot control, Britain is gripped by an end-times desolation (see End of the ...
Saramago, José
(1922-2010) Portuguese author who published as a very young man an unmemorable first novel, Terra do Pecado ["Land of Sin"] (1947), and some plays and essays over the next decades, as well as the nonfantastic Levantado do chão (1980; trans Margaret Jull Costa as Raised from the Ground 2012); but only became well-known with his third novel, Memorial do convento ["Memorial of the Convent"] (1982; trans Giovanni Pontiero as Baltasar and Blimunda 1987), a lyrical Fabulation set in an ...
Grosse Verhau, Der
Film (1970; vt The Big Mess). Kairos Film. Produced and directed by Alexander Kluge. Written by Kluge, Wolfgang Mai. Cast includes Silvia Forsthofer, Siegfried Graue, Vincenz Starr and Maria Sterr. 86 minutes. Black and white and colour. / This West German comedy is by a director – a leading light of the German New Wave – whose apprenticeship was with Fritz Lang. It is an amusing Dystopia set in 2034 CE, when the Galaxy has been opened up to entrepreneurs, and monopoly ...
Forbes, Alexander
(1882-1965) US author whose sf novel, The Radio Gunner (1924) as Anonymous, depicts a Future War set in 1937 between Northern Europe, in alliance with the USA, and the Constantinople Coalition. Forbes's predictive powers were not strong, and his eponymous hero, who knows how to locate radio equipment with his special device, fails to enthral. [JC]
Swan American Magazine
UK slim Pulp magazine, published by G G Swan, London. The two (undated) sf issues in the series, #11 (probably 1948) and #15 (probably 1949), were resettings with UK illustrations of parts of Future Fantasy and Science Fiction (a variant title of Future Fiction), December 1942, and of Science Fiction Quarterly, Winter 1942. This was effectively a postwar renewal, with new numbering, of the earlier Swan Yankee Magazine series. [FHP] links / Galactic Central illustrated checklist
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 ...