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Tuesday 24 May 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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Digest
A term used to describe a Magazine format, in contrast to, for example, Slick or Pulp, which are both larger. The format was made popular by the Reader's Digest, which first appeared in February 1922, though at that time the word "digest" meant that the magazine was presenting a selection of material from a wide range of other sources and thus making it "digestible" to the reader. The word referred to the content, not the size, but that original meaning has long since been superseded. / The ...
Stine, G Harry
(1928-1997) US author who published most of his early work, most of it Children's SF, as by Lee Correy, but who in the 1980s began increasingly to publish fiction under his own name; his popularizing nonfiction about space travel and satellites had always been released under his own name, however, as was his first story, "Galactic Gadgeteers" in Astounding for May 1951. As Correy, his best-known sf tale is "'... And a Star to Steer Her By'" (June 1953 Astounding), to which his first novel, a ...
Adam and Eve
Brian W Aldiss has given the name Shaggy God Stories to stories which provide simple-minded sf frameworks for Biblical myths. A considerable fraction of the unsolicited material submitted to sf magazines is or was reputed to consist of stories of this kind, the plot most frequently represented being the one in which survivors of a space disaster land on a virgin world and reveal (in the final line) that their names are Adam and Eve. Understandably, these stories rarely see print, although A E ...
Collyn, George
Pseudonym used for short sf by UK author Colin Pilkington (1937-2002), whose work mostly appeared in New Worlds, plus one story in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. [DRL] see also: Sun. /
Teratoid Guide, The
US letter-size saddle-stapled Media Magazines Fanzine. Editor and publisher: Claude D Plume Jr. Four undated but numbered issues, 1973 to 1974. Publication schedule was roughly quarterly. / The Teratoid Guide attempted to list all magazines concerning any type of "fantastic" films that had been published in various countries up to and including 1973. Its subtitle was "The International Guide to Magazines dealing with Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films". This admirably ambitious ...
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 ...