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Sunday 5 February 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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Huxley, Julian
(1887-1975) UK biologist, journalist and author, elder brother of Aldous Huxley, in active service during World War One. His first work of sf interest, "Philosophic Ants: A Biologic Fantasy" (read May 1922 to the Heretics Club, Cambridge; 1922 Cornhill Magazine), though constructed as an essay, intriguingly speculates on ants' radical non-mammalian Perception of the world, and how their ...
Burke, Jonathan
Working name for most of his sf of UK author John Burke (1922-2011), who wrote sf and fantasy under his own name (much of his short sf is so signed) as well as J F Burke and Robert Miall, and who used various other pseudonyms for non-fantastic work. He was active in Fandom in the 1930s (see The Fantast; The Futurian; The Satellite), only beginning to ...
Crawford, Theron Clark
(1849-1925) US entrepreneur (involved with various Buffalo Bill enterprises), journalist and (apparently) Theosophist (see Theosophy), active circa 1885-1925; from about 1898 he was based mainly in London. The protagonist of A Man and His Soul: An Occult Romance of Washington Life (1894) finds himself semi-occultly able to glimpse the future of America, a quasi-Utopia dominated by advances in technology. The title ...
Baruth, Philip
(? - ) US politician, academic, journalist and author of sf interest for The X President (2003), a Satire set in an Alternate History version of 2055, the Jonbar Point being Bill Clinton's 1990s dishonourable conciliation of the tobacco companies, which has led by stages to the current Cigarette Wars with America pitted against Russia and China. ...
Lunts, Lev N
(1901-1924) Russian playwright, critic, translator and author, founder of the Serapion Brothers, a group of experimentalist authors, whose name he took from E T A Hoffmann's collection of that name. He is of specific sf interest for The City of Truth (trans John Silver from manuscript 1929), in which a surreal search by soldiers for the heart of Mother Russia deposits them in a Utopian City ...
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 ...