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Wednesday 18 June 2025
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Forsyth, Frederick
(1938-2025) UK author who gained fame with his first novel, The Day of the Jackal (1971), and whose books are generally political thrillers. The Shepherd (1975 chap), however, is a sentimental Timeslip or ghost fantasy in which a pilot on Christmas Eve 1957 is saved from crashing by a World War Two pilot in an antique bomber: pilot and plane had been shot down on the Christmas Eve of 1943. ...
Lebow, Richard Ned
(1941- ) French-born political scientist, in US from infancy, prolific in his field for many years; he is of sf interest for two recent volumes. Forbidden Fruit: Counterfactuals and International Relations (2010) is a sustained analysis of Alternate History narratives, which he calls Counterfactuals, a term perhaps too easily understood to imply that historical facts are safely ...
Miller, Thomas
(? -? ) UK author of a Lost Race tale, Fred and the Gorillas (1870), in which a race of advanced gorillas (see Apes as Human) is discovered, but treated spoofishly. [JC]
Teleportation
Although a common item of sf Terminology, this word is (or has been) used in three different ways. / 1. Charles Fort used it in Wild Talents (1932) as a synonym for "psychokinesis" or, later, Telekinesis; i.e., the ability to move objects by the power of the mind alone. This seems to be the first appearance of the term in print, as is Fort's use of "teleport" as a verb in ...
Lovegrove, James
(1965- ) UK author who also writes as Jay Amory (note play on his name) and has set crosswords for UK newspapers as Jael; his first novel, The Hope (1990) – set on a vast ocean liner as evocative of the topos of the Ship of Fools as it is of the Generation Starship or the Pocket Universe – is vigorously ...
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 ...