SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
Spillane, Mickey
(1918-2006) Working name of US author Frank Morrison Spillane, whose career began with early-1940s work in Comics, writing scripts for Superhero characters including Batman and Sub-Mariner. His bestselling thrillers starring private eye Mike Hammer, beginning with I, the Jury (1946), notoriously featured much Sex and extreme (for that era) violence, often against ...
Taylor, D J
(1960- ) UK literary critic, biographer and author whose novels have normally not ventured into the fantastic; of sf interest, however, is The Windsor Faction (2013), an Alternate History tale set at the end of the 1930s in Britain, with Edward VIII (who in the real world abdicated in 1936) still on the throne (see Jonbar Point). Though affected by a demureness typical of ...
Longyear, Barry B
(1942- ) US author and editor who ran a printing company with his wife before beginning to write in 1977. He soon published his first sf story, "The Tryouts" in Asimov's for November/December 1978. Before his 1981 hospitalization for alcoholism and addiction to prescription drugs – an experience which formed the basis of his non-sf novel Saint Mary Blue (1988) – he had already published prolifically, sometimes as by ...
Weird Science
1. Comic (see Comics). Seminal Anthology comic book published by EC Comics from 1950 to 1953. The 22 issues of the series have returned to print dozens of times since their original publication, although they have not stood the test of time as strongly as other EC publications, such as Tales from the Crypt. Edited, often written and sometimes drawn by Al ...
Webster, Henry Kitchell
(1875-1932) US author in whose sf novel, The Sky-Man (1910), a young soldier and inventor, having built a winged lighter-than-air single-person Airship, is flying it in the Arctic where he encounters a young woman searching for her missing father, who has indicated via a message in a bottle that he has discovered a clement Lost World. He saves her from rape, and the tale ends happily. [JC]
Robinson, Roger
(1943- ) UK computer programmer, bibliographer and publisher, active in UK Fandom for many years. The Writings of Henry Kenneth Bulmer (1983 chap; rev 1984 chap) is an exhaustive Bibliography of one of the most prolific sf writers, Kenneth Bulmer, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its ...