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Saturday 29 January 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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Scientific Detective Monthly
US letter-size magazine; ten monthly issues, January to October 1930, published by Gernsback Publications, for the first issue, and thereafter by Techni-Craft Publishing Co; edited by Hugo Gernsback, with Arthur B Reeve as editorial consultant. It was a sister magazine to Science Wonder Stories (see Wonder Stories) and Air Wonder Stories. From issue #6 it was retitled Amazing Detective Tales (though Scientific Detective Monthly more accurately described the magazine's contents) and edited by ...
Sowden, Lewis
(1903-1974) UK-born South African newspaperman and author, in Israel from 1966, whose The Man Who Was Emperor: A Romance (1946) is set in an imaginary country of marginal sf interest. Tomorrow's Comet: A Tale of our own Times (July-August 1949 Blue Book as "Star of Doom"; 1951) deals with the End of the World in psychological terms. [JC/PN]
Soylent Green
Film (1973). MGM. Directed by Richard Fleischer. Written by Stanley R Greenberg, based on Make Room! Make Room! (1966) by Harry Harrison. Cast includes Chuck Connors, Joseph Cotten, Charlton Heston, Paula Kelly, Edward G Robinson and Leigh Taylor-Young. 97 minutes. Colour. / A New York police detective (Heston) in a 2022 CE marked by massive Overpopulation investigates what appears to be a routine murder and in the end discovers that "soylent green", the main food for the world's ...
Strikeshoulder, Viter
Pseudonym of US author Wayland Spaulding (1850-1918), apparently most active in Poughkeepsie, New York; his Near Future Satire, When Theodore Is King [for subtitle see Checklist below] (1907 chap), lampoons the political ascendancy of President Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919) after working-class unrest beginning in 1907 and climaxing two years later with his ascension to the newly-created throne, with Canada begging to unite with the new monarchy. The book, which is dated 1909, is told in ...
Porcupine Tree
UK progressive rock band, founded by Steven Wilson (1967- ), relatively little-known but prolific and deftly creative of a series of attractive and musically complex sonic structures, often sf or Fantasy in styling. "Jupiter Islands" (on On The Sunday of Life, 1991) describes a gauchely "Dancers at the End of Time" cosmos ("Magenta forests on a crimson sea ... Scarlet moons in a domino sky"); although "Space Transmission" and "Radioactive Toy" are more controlled. The ...
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 ...