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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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Kring, Michael K
(1952- ) US author whose Space Mavericks series of Space Operas The Space Mavericks (1980) and Children of the Night (1981) – carries its protagonists through various adventures but not to their destination planet: the conclusion to the series was never published, due to difficulties experienced by Kring's publisher, Leisure Books. [JC]
Hopen, Stuart
(? - ) US author of Comics from the 1970s, his best-known title being the single issue of Daemon Mask (1987) with Russ Martin. His first novel, Warp Angel (1995), is a conspicuous rogue singleton in the world of the New Space Opera: the more baroque, intensely conceived, transgressive form of Space Opera that came to maturity in the 1990s. In a four-planet system itself "warped" by the universal ban on Faster Than Light warp travel – the use of ...
Robotron 2084
Videogame (1982). Vid Kidz (VK). Designed by Eugene Jarvis, Larry DeMar. Platforms: Arcade, Others. / Robotron is a two-dimensional arcade game (see Videogames) in which the player must defend the last human family against unending waves of hostile Robots. The game is notable for its frantic pace. Enemies attack continuously from all sides, while the player must use two joysticks to fire and move simultaneously. Where the designers' earlier game Defender (1980) is about speed and freedom, ...
Adlington, L J
(1970- ) UK author of Young Adult titles including the two Pelly D tales, The Diary of Pelly D (2005) and Cherry Heaven (2007). In the first volume, a young boy from City Five finds the buried diaries of Pelly D, which make up the body of the text, and explain how the sanitized Dystopian world of the novel's present has come into being through ethnic cleansing and other intolerable governmental initiatives; the second volume follows its cast into a Utopia also rooted in ...
Nation, Terry
(1930-1997) UK author of television screenplays and other works, latterly resident in the US. He has the distinction of exercising a formative influence on three major sf series, Doctor Who (1963-current), Survivors (1975-1977) and Blake's Seven (1978-1981). / Nation began his writing career producing comedy material, for Tony Hancock among others, in the late 1950s and early 1960s. He also produced other work, including adaptations of sf stories such as Philip K Dick's "Impostor" (June ...
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 ...