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Sunday 12 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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Toxic Avenger, The
Film (1984). HCH/Troma/Palan. Directed by Michael Herz, Samuel Weil. Written by Joe Ritter, based on a story by Lloyd Kaufman. Cast includes Mitchell Cohen, Andree Maranda and Mark Torgl. 100 minutes, cut to 79 minutes. Colour. / After a cruel practical joke is played on him, a teenage nerd falls into a barrel of toxic waste in Tromaville, New Jersey, "Toxic Waste Capital of America". He mutates (see Mutants) into the low-budget ...
Jackson, Stuart
(? -2006) UK teacher and author, whose Tracer (1990) depicts a Near Future Britain whose government jails AIDS victims. [JC]
Ross, Malcolm
(1895-1965) US author and reporter, the protagonist of whose Time in Reverse sf novel, The Man Who Lived Backward (1950), lives from 1940 to 1865, dying just after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, which he is therefore unable to prevent. [JC]
Tanigawa Nagaru
(1970- ) Japanese author largely in the Light Novel (chapbook) format, whose works bridge the ever-closing gap between fans of literary sf, Manga and Anime in Japanese culture. A graduate in Law from Kwansei Gakuin University, he first published sf with Dengeki Aegis 5 ["Shock! Aegis 5"] (March 2003 Dengeki Moeō; fixup 2004), a ...
Burns, Alan
(1929-2013) UK lawyer, academic and author, long resident in the USA; in the UK again after about 1980. Some of his Fabulations at novel length, such as Europe After the Rain (1965), Celebrations (1967), Babel (1969) and Dreamerika!: A Surrealist Fantasy (1972), utilize sf instruments to grapple with a surreal vision of a modern world toppling jaggedly into chaos. His techniques on occasion resemble those ...
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 ...