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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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Laing, Alexander
(1903-1976) US author, editor and academic, noted for his books on the sea, for editing The Haunted Omnibus (anth 1937; vt Great Ghost Stories of the World 1939), an extremely influential Anthology, and for his murder novel, The Cadaver of Gideon Wyck, by a Medical Student (1934), which hinges on experiments in Genetic Engineering inflicted upon pregnant women. The ...
Clock, Herbert
(1890-1979) US businessman and author, in active service during World War One, apparently senior collaborator with the lawyer Eric Boetzel (1884-1958), whose role was to cut the manuscript in half, on The Light in the Sky (1929), an sf tale set in the Underground Lost World of Atzlan, extending from Mexico into the Gulf of Mexico. Aztecs had retreated here after the genocidal ...
Siegel, Martin
(1938-1972) US author who died young of leukaemia. His sf novels are Agent of Entropy (1969) and The Unreal People (1973). The first combines Satire and Space Opera in a heated tale; the second is a post-holocaust Pocket-Universe tale in which Earth's surface is uninhabitable and people live frenetically and desperately Underground. [JC]
Bartlett, Landell
(1897-1972) US editor and author, known now mainly for The Vanguard of Venus: Presented with the Compliments of Amazing Stories (1928 chap), a story published as a pamphlet to advertise the magazine: a geologist is abducted Underground by Aliens from Venus, who are about to invade Earth for lebensraum; sure that no one will believe his tale, they release him. A sequel, "Operation Venus" (March 1948 ...
Asprin, Robert Lynn
(1946-2008) US author who began publishing sf with his first novel, The Cold Cash War (1977), which alarmingly conflates Game-World antics (like fake Wars between mercenaries representing rival corporations on rented turf – Brazil, for instance, being visualized mainly as an arena for world-dominating firms to play games in) and a political rationale to legitimize the corporate control of Earth. Asprin's later novels ...
Robinson, Roger
(1943- ) UK computer programmer, bibliographer and publisher, active in UK Fandom for many years. The Writings of Henry Kenneth Bulmer (1983 chap; rev 1984 chap) is an exhaustive Bibliography of one of the most prolific sf writers, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its listing of Pseudonyms. ...