SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 18 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.
Site updated on 17 January 2022
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
Schaub, Mary
(1943-2009) US author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Serpentine" in Survival from Infinity (anth 1974) edited by Roger Elwood, and most of whose subsequent work was fantasy. "Exile", a book-length tale assembled in Flight of Vengeance (anth 1992) edited with P M Griffin and Andre Norton, is a Planetary Romance set in Norton's Witch World universe, as is The Magestone (1996) with Andre Norton. [JC]
Jones, Diana Wynne
(1934-2011) UK author whose name is sometimes incorrectly rendered as Diana Wynne-Jones, although not on her books; probably the premier UK writer of children's Fantasy in the late twentieth century, she received a British Fantasy special award in 1992, and a World Fantasy Award for lifetime achievement in 2007. She began her writing career as a playwright, with three plays produced in London 1967-1970, then published her first novel (for adults and not sf), the humorous Changeover (1970). Her ...
Szirtes, George
(1948- ) Hungarian-born poet and translator, in the UK since the Hungarian Uprising in 1956; he writes in English, and has been active as a poet since about 1973. From the late 1980s, he has also been productive as a translator, always from the Hungarian. Authors given entries in this encyclopedia whose work he has translated include Ferenc Karinthy, László Krasznahorkai and Imre Madách. Szirtes's translations are crisply muscular, as is his poetry. ...
Kamishibai
["Paper Theatre"] Although there has been a scroll-based story-telling tradition in Japan since the 12th century, for our purposes the kamishibai medium was a spin-off that flourished between the 1920s and the 1950s, spanning the Depression era, the peak of Japanese Imperialism, and the American postwar Occupation. / A kamishibai was a frame mounted on the back of a bicycle, coincidentally equivalent in dimensions to a modern flat-screen TV. The story-teller would ride to a spot in a park ...
Stanley, Dorothy
(1855-1926) UK painter who worked as Dorothy Tennant and author, married to the explorer Henry Morton Stanley (1841-1904). In her World War One novel, Miss Pym's Camouflage (1918), an essentially fantasy device – Invisibility at will, without any explanation – is applied with considerable wit as Miss Perdita Pym demonstrates her powers to the War Office (see Women in SF), is sent as a spy to Germany, engages in various adventures, and returns with valuable secrets. [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 ...