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Saturday 22 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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Weinbaum, Stanley G
(1902-1935) US author whose interest in sf dated from his youth (he published "The Lost Battle" in a school magazine, The Mercury, in December 1917; it forecasts that World War One will end in 1921) but who did not begin to publish sf professionally until the 1930s, after selling a romance novel – "The Lady Dances" (1934 in various King Features Syndicate newspapers) as by Marge Stanley – to a newspaper syndicate, and after a first sf novel, «The Mad Brain», had been ...
Blue Thunder
Film (1983). Rastar/Gordon Carroll Productions. Directed John Badham. Written by Dan O'Bannon, Don Jakoby. Cast includes Candy Clark, Malcolm McDowell, Warren Oates, Roy Scheider and Daniel Stern. 110 minutes. Colour. / Borderline sf set in a very Near-Future Los Angeles, Blue Thunder tells the story of Murphy (Scheider), a helicopter-based police officer, asked to try out a new supercopter: it can see through walls, fire missiles, fly at 200 knots and hear conversations from far away. ...
Appleton, Victor
A House Name of the US Stratemeyer Syndicate, used mainly on the Don Sturdy series, and on the four Tom Swift series, which together constitute a central example of the importance and persistence of the Edisonade in US sf; for a detailed Tom Swift Checklist, see Tom Swift. Howard R Garis wrote the first 35 of the first series, which stopped at #38. The second series, which deals with Tom Swift, Jr, was initially the work of – or supervised by – Harriet Stratemeyer Adams, Edward ...
Ruocchio, Christopher
(? - ) US editor and author whose Sun Eater sequence beginning with Empire of Silence (2018) and Howling Dark (2019) ambitiously invokes former versions of the long-breathed dynastic epic set in the context of the Galactic Empire. Earlier writers and their work conspicuously addressed include Gordon R Dickson, whose Dorsai series features a central protagonist with similar skills and family-romance complications; Frank Herbert, whose Dune series provides ...
Van Greenaway, Peter
Almost certainly the working name of UK lawyer, actor, scriptwriter and author Arthur Greenaway (1927-1988), according to information obtained by Steve Holland; he focused on fiction from about 1960. Though he never became known as a genre writer, much of his work was sf (see Horror in SF), including his first novel, The Crucified City (1962), a Post-Holocaust story set in a devastated London after a nuclear bomb has been dropped, and his second, The Evening Fool (1964), which carries its ...
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 ...