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Friday 17 January 2025
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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Rocklynne, Ross
Working name of US author Ross Louis Rocklin (1913-1988) for his sf stories, most of which appeared in such magazines as Astounding from the mid-1930s up to 1947, beginning with "Man of Iron" for Astounding in 1935. He specialized in Space-Opera plots constructed around sometimes ingenious "scientific" problems, such as how to escape from the centre of a hollow planet in "At the Center of Gravity" (June 1936 ...
Mosley, Walter
(1952- ) US author, best known for his crime fiction, in particular the Easy Rawlins sequence beginning with Devil in a Blue Dress (1990). He is of sf interest for several books. Blue Light (1998), an Equipoisal tale, traces the consequences of the eponymous radiance from space, which strikes the earth in discrete "needles" in 1965 and transforms (see Shapeshifters) ...
Giant Spider Invasion, The
Film (1975). Group 75/Transcentury. Directed by Bill Rebane. Written by Robert Easton, Richard L Huff. Cast includes Steve Brodie, Alan Hale, Barbara Hale and Leslie Parrish. 76 minutes. Colour. / Noted by one critic, Michael Weldon, as the Monster Movie with the worst special effects since The Giant Claw (1957), this is fondly remembered as the one where the giant spider was built out of a modified ...
Mysterious Island, The
US film (1929). Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Directed by Benjamin Christensen, Lucien Hubbard and Maurice Tourneur; underwater sequences directed by J Ernest Williamson. Written by Lucien Hubbard, loosely based on the works of Jules Verne. Cast includes Lionel Barrymore, Jacqueline Gadsden, Lloyd Hughes and Montagu Love. 95 minutes. Originally predominantly two-colour Technicolor, but apparently only black and white copies survive [see American Film Institute ...
Bellow, Saul
(1915-2005) Canadian-born US author, winner of the 1976 Nobel Prize for Literature, and generally thought of as the premier Mainstream novelist of his generation in the US. Some of his books distantly resemble sf, specifically Henderson the Rain King (1959), a picaresque partly set in a quasimythical African kingdom. Mr Sammler's Planet (1970) has been wrongly annexed as sf by several ...
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 ...