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Tuesday 10 December 2024
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 9 December 2024
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Friedell, Egon
(1878-1938) Austrian cabaret artist, wit, polymath, translator and author, born Egon Friedmann (he changed his name to Friedell in 1916), rejected for military service in World War One through physical disabilities; he also wrote as by Egon Friedländer. He remains best known for his seminal Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit: die Krisis der europäischen Seele von der Schwarzen Pest bis zum Weltkrieg (1927-1931 ...
Baker, Kage
(1952-2010) US author who was born Mary Kate Genevieve Baker but had legally changed her name to Kage Baker by the age of twenty; she worked in insurance and the theatre before publishing In the Garden of Iden (1997; vt In the Garden of Iden: A Novel of the Company 1998), the first in the series of Company or Dr Zeus stories, which occupied most of her career. The sequence, whose implications gradually darkened, focuses on the actions of a cadre of ...
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins
(1860-1935) US editor, author and lecturer, and an important figure in the history of US Feminism; daughter of Frederick B Perkins; partner in the 1890s of Adeline Knapp. Although by no means negligible – she published almost 200 short stories plus longer works, many of them inherently interesting – much of her later fiction was clearly shaped to promulgate a copious flow of ...
Swirsky, Rachel
(1982- ) US editor, poet and author, focusing in the latter capacity almost entirely on work in shorter forms; she began to publish work of genre interest with "Scene from a Dystopia" in Subterranean #4 (2006). By 2013 she had already released nearly fifty stories, almost all of them bristling with transgressive "violations" of the genre purities of the previous century; her work represents a strenuous and at times stringent argument for ...
Duel
Made-for-tv film (1971). ABC/Universal. Directed by Steven Spielberg. Written by Richard Matheson, based on his original story "Duel" (April 1971 Playboy). Cast includes Eddie Firestone, Charles Steel and Dennis Weaver. 75 minutes; expanded and released outside the USA as a feature film, 90 minutes. Colour. / Universal Studios were so impressed by this television film directed by ...
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 ...