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Friday 29 September 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 25 September 2023
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BEM
A once common item of sf Terminology, being an acronym of Bug-Eyed Monster and referring to the type of Alien creature, usually menacing, which was regularly pictured on the covers of SF Magazines in the 1930s and 1940s. [PN] see also: Monsters. /
Meyers, Walter E
(1939- ) US academic based at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. A grammarian and medievalist, WEM has also been teaching sf and fantasy since the 1970s (currently with John Kessel). His first book of genre interest, Aliens and Linguists: Language Study and Science Fiction (1980), is an excellent and amusing work on Linguistics in sf; the argument is updated in "The Language and ...
Edge Detector
Canadian Semiprozine, published and edited by Glenn Grant of London, Ontario (for the first two issues; Montreal, Quebec for the third issue) which saw three letter-size issues in Summer 1988, Summer 1989 and Summer 1991, all three computer-typeset. The magazine sought to develop experimental fiction beyond the Cyberpunk revolution and included work by Paul Di Filippo and Rudy ...
Futures Past
US historical Semiprozine edited by Jim Emerson, published from Convoy, Ohio, letter-size format, saddle-stapled. Three issues in 1992 and a fourth in 1994. / This ambitious venture, a contribution to the History of SF subtitled "A Visual Guidebook To Science Fiction History", was sadly soon aborted in its initial form. Each issue, as intended, covered the history of one year in sf, beginning ...
Dream Theater
US prog rock band, formed in 1985 by guitarist John Petrucci (1967- ), bassist John Ro Myung (1967- ) and Michael Portnoy (1967- ). Their first album When Dream and Day Unite (1989) is an energetic reworking of classic 1970s prog-rock musical idiom, and included the long song "The Killing Hand", which concerns a future war between an evil genius and a messiah-figure. The various tracks on Images and Words ...
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 ...