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Saturday 2 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
Sponsor of the day: Ansible Editions
Casparian, Gregory
(1856-1942) Turkish-Armenia-born painter, photo-engraver and author, whose distant Near Future sf novel, The Anglo-American Alliance: A Serio-Comic Romance and Forecast of the Future (1906), frames its central story with a description of a twentieth-century dominated by America and the UK; Technology has advanced in various ways; Sex can be determined prenatally; Suspended Animation has been invented; and a new telescope has uncovered the existence of a new planet inhabited by Aliens capable of ...
Wallis, Dave
(1917-1990) UK teacher (after serving with the Royal Signals during World War Two) and author of four novels. Only one is sf: the near-future Dystopian fantasy Only Lovers Left Alive (1964), in which the mass suicide of the adult population leaves teenagers on their own in what rapidly becomes an anarchic UK. The book expressed contemporary Paranoia about scooter gangs, adolescent violence, teen Sex, loud music and funny hairstyles, yet, significantly, retained faith in the fundamental decency ...
Biro, Val
Working name of Hungarian-born illustrator and author Balint Stephen Biro (1921-2014), in the UK from 1939 until his death. During his prolific career as a book illustrator, which began in the early 1940s – his woodcut illustrations for Paul Tabori's Private Gallery (coll 1944) are already extremely accomplished – he executed a number of covers for sf and fantasy books, though never in a style that demonstrated any deep affinity for the iconography of the fantastic; an early cover ...
White, T H
(1906-1964) Indian-born author, in the UK from the age of five, where he was raised by relatives; his overwhelming nostalgia for a lost England expressed itself vividly throughout his nonfiction, as well as in his two best-known fictional works, the nonfantastic Farewell Victoria (1933), and The Once and Future King (omni/novel 1958), a superlative tragicomic fantasia on Le Morte Darthur (written before 1471; 1485) by Sir Thomas Malory (1415/1418-1471). The Once and Future King is sometimes ...
Kent, Steven L
(1960- ) US author of the Clone Republic sequence of Military SF stories involving a society of Clone soldiers who find an overachieving human warrior, with a mind of his own, difficult to come to terms with; the series begins with The Clone Republic (2006), and is projected to continue indefinitely. [JC]
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 ...