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Monday 27 June 2022
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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Barclay James Harvest
UK prog-rock band formed in the late 1960s by guitarist John Lees (1947- ), bassist Les Holroyd (1948- ), keyboard player Stuart "Woolly" Wolstenholme (1947-2010) and percussionist Mel Pritchard (1948-2004). The band's folk-influenced music, informed by a rather egregious agrarian pastoralism, occasionally reverted to a Dystopian sf. Their song "Negative Earth" (in Everyone Is Everybody Else, 1974) concerns a marooned astronaut facing his own death. ...
Firestone, Shulamith
(1945-2012) Canadian-born painter, activist and author, resident in the United States from childhood, who was a founding figure in radical Feminism, and a key thinker in the movement in late-1960s New York. / Firestone outlined her ideas in The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (1970), which argued, among other points, that women would not be truly liberated until they were freed from the shackles of Biology. Playfully melding Marx and Freud, she argued that Sex was also a ...
Time Machine
One of the early key items of sf Terminology, first used by H G Wells in the title of The Time Machine (1895). It is, of course, a Machine designed for Time Travel. Less famous predecessors are Edward Page Mitchell's fantasy "The Clock that Went Backward" (September 1881 The Sun anon) – seemingly the first story of time travel effected by a machine, the eponymous clock; Enrique Gaspar's "El anachronópete" (in Novelas, coll 1887; trans as The Time Ship: A Chrononautical Journey ...
New People, The
US tv series (1969-1970) Thomas/Spelling Productions for Paramount Television ABC TV network. Created by Larry Gordon. Produced by Harold Gast. Directors include Charles S Dubin, Harry Harvey Jr and William Wiard. Scriptwriters include Edwin Blum, Paul Dubov, Gast and Stephen Kandel. Rod Serling was reportedly involved in developing the series concept, and may have written some episodes under unidentified pseudonyms. Cast: Tiffany Bolling, Zooey Hall, David Moses. 17 45-minute episodes. / ...
Simpson, Robert
(? - ) US author whose fiction has solely been written as Ties to the Star Trek universe, beginning with "Allegro Ouroboros in D Minor" in The Lives of Dax (anth 1999) edited by Marco Palmieri, and including Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Mission Gamma: Lesser Evil (2002). [JC]
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 and one Semiprozine Hugo for his self-produced news magazine, Ansible (which see). His one ...