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Friday 1 July 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.
Site updated on 27 June 2022
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Page, Kathy
(1958- ) UK author, in Canada from 2001, whose first novels – Back in the First Person (1986) and The Unborn Dreams of Clara Riley (1987) – are associational, though tinged with elements of literary fantasy. Island Paradise (1989), set a century after the Unfought War, promulgates an ambiguous worldwide Utopia whose citizens enjoy lives uncluttered by violence, but are bullied to die soon after they reach 50 to keep the threat of Overpopulation at bay. Some of ...
Fyne, Neal
A probable pseudonym of an unidentified UK author (? -? ) known only for a Lost World tale, The Land of the Living Dead: A Narrative of the Perilous Sojourn There of George Cowper, Mariner, in the Year 1835 (1897), set on an uncharted Island ruled by a tyrant – the Mighty Justin – who controls his subjects by possession of the antidote to the Poison gases emitted by the local volcano; this antidote, and other evidences, make it clear that the humans ...
Wesley, Mary
Pseudonym of UK author Mary Aline Siepmann (née Farmar) (1912-2002) whose first three novels were Young Adult tales somewhat removed from the acerbic, take-no-prisoners, erotically charged adult novels she published in later life, beginning with Jumping the Queue (1983). The Sixth Seal (1969) describes the survival of its protagonists Underground during the course of an unspecific but seemingly planetary Disaster, after which they must attempt to work out how to live in the new world. ...
Manley, Delarivier
(?1663-1724) UK playwright and author who has come to be ranked along with Aphra Behn and Eliza Haywood for the strength and wit of her work as an independent female writer (see Feminism). Her New Atalantis "scandal fiction" sequence [for a tentative indication of its complicated publishing history see Checklist] is an extended anti-Whig Satire of contemporary life, cursorily disguising her many targets through a narrative purporting to record an exploratory visit by Astraea the Goddess of ...
Grimes, Tom
Working name of Thomas J Grimes (1954- ), US author of two Near Future Satires: City of God (1995) views pre-millennium America as a media-dominated funhouse full of terrors; WILL@epicqwest.com: (A Medicated Memoir) (2003) sends its protagonist through a similarly deranged and deranging Cyberspace in a McGuffin-like quest for the source of a strange new disease, which turns out not to be so harmless as it may have seemed, as it is a viral manifestation of ...
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 ...