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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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Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, The
1. Radio series (1978, 1980). BBC Radio 4. Written and created by Douglas Adams, produced by Simon Brett (first episode) and Geoffrey Perkins (subsequent episodes). Cast includes Peter Jones as The Book, Simon Jones as Arthur Dent, Geoffrey McGivern as Ford Prefect, Stephen Moore as Marvin the Paranoid Android, Mark Wing-Davey as Zaphod Beeblebrox and Susan Sheridan as Trillian. Six 30-minute episodes broadcast weekly from 8 March 1978 to ...
Boie, Kirsten
(1950- ) German teacher and author, active from 1985 in the production of tales mostly for younger children, often assembled in series, little of her early work translated into English. She is of some interest for the Skogland sequence beginning with Skogland (2005; trans David Henry Wilson as The Princess Plot 2009), a Ruritanian tale whose impostor princess wants ...
Hall, Hal
Working name of US author Harold Curtis Hall (1911-1992), not to be confused with Hal W Hall; his Future War novel, The Great Conflict (1942) is faintly inspired by World War Two. [JC]
Golden Age of SF
It has been said, cynically, that the Golden Age of sf is twelve. (This epigram, often wrongly ascribed or paraphrased with slightly different ages, was coined by the sf fan Peter Graham.) / Certainly there is no objective measure by which we can say that the sf of any one period was notably superior to that of any other. Nonetheless, in conventional usage (at least within Fandom) some older readers have referred to the years 1938-1946 as sf's first Golden Age, ...
Waugh, Sylvia
(1935-2022), UK teacher, librarian, careers adviser and author whose first book was the children's fantasy The Mennyms (1993), about a miniature Wainscot Society comprising a single family living quasi-secretly in a house in the suburbs of some north-England town or City: the well-delineated family members are not human but magically animated life-size rag dolls, whose quiet existence is here seemingly endangered ...
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 ...