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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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Nobel Prize
The Nobel Prize for Literature, chosen annually by the Swedish Academy – with occasional no-award years during World War One and World War Two – is not of course a genre Award. Below are listed the Nobel laureates in this category who have written sf or near-sf to the extent that they receive entries in the present encyclopedia. In addition to the honour, laureates receive a cash prize currently set at eight million Swedish kronor, roughly £730,000 or $900,000 in 2017. The ...
Invasion
Futuristic fiction in the UK was given a tremendous boost by the success of George T Chesney's clever piece of propaganda, The Battle of Dorking (May 1871 Blackwood's Magazine; 1871 chap), which put the case for army reform and rearmament by offering a dramatic illustration of the ease with which the UK might fall to an invading German army (see Battle of Dorking). This became the foundation-stone of a subgenre of Future-War stories whose history is described in I F Clarke's excellent Voices ...
Riddell, J L
(1807-1865) US chemist, botanist, inventor and author of Orrin Lindsay's Plan of Aerial Navigation, with a Narrative of his Explorations in the Higher Regions of the Atmosphere, and his Wonderful Voyage Round the Moon! (1847 chap), a hoax narrative clearly indebted to Edgar Allan Poe's "Hans Phaall – A Tale" (June 1835 The Southern Literary Messenger), both exemplifying the complex interrelation between hoax and Thought Experiment significant in the shaping of twentieth-century Hard SF. ...
Baker, Matthew
(1985- ) US author who began publishing work of some genre interest with "Foundling" in Lumberyard for 2009. His first collection, Hybrid Creatures (coll of linked stories 2015), follows the thematically linked search of four varied characters for meaningful community in a fractured Media Landscape, each of them plagued by the dysfunctional Communication systems of the twenty-first century world. "A Bad Day in Utopia" (2019 Lightspeed), more clearly Near Future, explores ...
Johnson, Kenneth
(1942- ) US screenwriter, producer and director, most of whose work as been in Television, specifically as the creator of the sf and borderline-sf series The Incredible Hulk (1977-1982), The Secret Empire (1979), Stop Susan Williams (1979; vt Cliffhangers: Stop Susan Williams) and "V" (1983-1985), and producer of The Bionic Woman (1976-1978). For Cinema he produced Short Circuit 2 (1988), the sequel to Short Circuit (1986) (which see). Twenty years after the original "V", ...
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 ...