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Saturday 1 April 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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Thomas, D M
(1935-2023) UK poet and author who made use of sf themes most explicitly in such early Poetry as "The Head-Rape" in New Worlds for March 1968 and the two-part "Computer 70: Dreams & Lovepoems" (March-April 1970 New Worlds), a sequence assembled with other poetry of interest in Logan Stone (coll 1970); or the later "S. F." (in The Umbral Anthology of Science Fiction Poetry, anth ...
Dixon, Don
(1951- ) American artist, long a resident of California. A passion for stargazing, and his admiration of artist Chesley Bonestell, led the young Dixon to begin painting and selling his own astronomical paintings in the early 1970s. These brought Dixon an invitation to work on a documentary film for NASA, leading to his involvement in other film projects and assignments to paint magazine and book covers. He is credited for his ...
Gordimer, Nadine
(1923-2014) South African author, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991. From her long career – she began publishing short fiction in 1937 – one novel is of sf interest, July's People (1981), set in a disarrayed Near Future South Africa; a white family is rescued from danger by its Black servant. Like other Gordimer novels touching on the politics and future of apartheid, the book was banned by ...
Defoe, Gideon
(1976- ) UK author whose very Young Adult Pirates! sequence beginning with The Pirates!: An Adventure with Scientists (2004), spoofishly but entertainingly engages an incompetent pirate band – whose banter shows the influence of Monty Python's Flying Circus (1969-1974) – in various adventures back and forth throughout the nineteenth century, as seen ...
King, Owen
(1977- ) US author, son of Stephen King and brother of Joe Hill, most of whose work has been nonfantastic, and who began to publish work of genre interest with "The Meerkat" in Who Can Save Us Now? (anth 2008) edited by King and John McNally. He is of some sf interest for Sleeping Beauties (2017) with Stephen King, a sophisticated embedding of ...
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 ...