SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 21 March 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.
Site updated on 20 March 2023
Sponsor of the day: Handheld Press
Ballou, William Hosea
(1857-1937) US author of several mild satires about social life in the American upper classes. His three novels of some genre interest are A Ride on a Cyclone (1889); The Bachelor Girl: A Novel of the 1400 (1890), which features a very fast motorized Balloon plus a romance; and The Upper Ten: A Novel of the Snobocracy (1890), in which a submarine Lost Race of mermen (see ...
Quotations
Sf has long suffered from the perception that its authors are characteristically excellent creators of ideas but clunky prose stylists, suggesting that the genre – and by inference the larger body of texts comprising Fantastika into which sf complexly fits – may not be distinguished by an abundance of well-turned phrases. Still, there are any number of statements by Genre SF writers and others, in stories and articles, that ...
Hall, Owen
Pseudonym of UK-born politician and author Hugh H Lusk (1838-1926), in New Zealand and Australia most of his life; not to be confused with Owen Hall, the pseudonym under which UK theatre critic James Davis (1853-1907) wrote plays. Along with some supernatural tales, Hall is of interest for a Lost Race tale, Eureka (1899), whose scholarly protagonists proceed, via the perusal of ancient documents, to the discovery of a hidden ...
Adams, Richard
(1920-2016) UK author who became instantly famous with his first novel, Watership Down (1972), a long, grave, well-crafted Animal Fantasy [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below], written ostensibly for children but clearly accessible to adults as well; it was followed by the pendant titles The Watership Down Film Picture Book (1978), which retells the same story as adapted for the animated film ...
X Minus One
Radio series (1955-1958). NBC-Radio network. NBC staff writers included Ernest Kinroy, George Lefferts and Howard Rodman. 126 30-minute episodes. / Initially a revival of Dimension X (1950-1951), this sf Radio drama anthology series was partnered at first with Astounding and later (from February 1956) with Galaxy, from which magazines the vast majority of stories were ...
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 ...