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Friday 22 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.
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Poltergeists
These imagined Supernatural Creatures, whose German name means "noisy ghost", have attracted some sporadic sf interest. Though never directly seen, poltergeists supposedly move or throw small articles around, break crockery (which is sometimes also hurled across a room while remaining miraculously unbroken) and so forth. Their reality was once enough of an accepted phenomenon that Edmund Crispin used a highly active ...
Carew, Henry
(? -? ) UK author of whom nothing is known beyond his authorship of two sf novels. In The Secret of the Sphinx (1923), explorers discover a Utopian city hidden in the middle of the Sahara Desert; unusually, this is not a lost world, as the culture and Inventions that drive the city are of modern origin. The Vampires of the Andes (1925) is, on the other hand, a genuine ...
Fraser, Ronald
(1888-1974) UK soldier, civil servant and author, in active service during World War One until an injury left him permanently disabled. Most of his work, like his first novel, The Flying Draper (1924; rev 1931), utilizes fantasy or sf devices – in this initial case levitation (see Telekinesis) – to create allegorical or philosophical arguments, unmistakably influenced by H G ...
Becker, Kurt
(1916-2010) US priest born in Venezuela with a German father; in the USA from 1924, applied for naturalization in 1946. His sf novel is the a Young Adult Countdown! (1958), whose protagonist worries whether or not he'll make the Mars flight; he does. [JC/SH]
Otherwise Award
The name under which the former James Tiptree Jr Award for gender-bending or gender-exploring speculative fiction has been presented since 2020 (for work published in the previous year). Otherwise Award winners are listed below by year of publication, and also for convenience of reference in the winner list of the older Tiptree Award entry. [DRL] Winners 2019: Akwaeke Emezi, ...
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 ...