SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 13 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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Carroll, Lewis
Pseudonym of UK photographer, mathematician and author Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832-1898), whose famous children's stories, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There (1871) – an early example of the novel (sf or otherwise) structured around the moves of a game of Chess – have had a profound impact on a wide range of writers, over and above the numerous ...
Cannon, Peter
(1951- ) US author, critic, and book reviews editor of Publishers Weekly, chiefly known for his work on H P Lovecraft and his circle; he wrote his undergraduate thesis on Lovecraft at Stanford and his MA thesis, "Lovecraft's New England", at Brown University (1974). He began publishing work of genre interest with "You Have Been in Providence, I Perceive" (March 1978 Nyctalops) and "H.P. Lovecraft in Hawthornian Perspective" ...
Gems, Jonathan
(1952- ) US screenwriter and author of Mars Attacks! (1996), a Tie to the Tim Burton film Mars Attacks! (1996), which it novelizes. This film's screenplay was also by Gems, based on the "Mars Attacks" series of Topps trading cards (1962); he had earlier co-scripted Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984), based on ...
Wallis, G McDonald
(1925-2011) US actress – under the names Hope Campbell and Kathy McDonald – and author; as by Hope Campbell, she wrote non-fantastic romance tales for about a decade from about 1943, and some Young Adult novels, including Looking for Hamlet: A Haunting at Deeping Lake (1987); as by Virginia Hughes, she wrote the Young Adult Peggy Lane Theatres Stories sequence of mild non-fantastic adventure tales; ...
Flash Gordon
1. US Comic strip created by artist Alex Raymond for King Features Syndicate. Flash Gordon appeared in 1934, at first in Sunday, later in daily newspapers. Its elaborately shaded style and exotic storyline made it one of the most influential sf strips. It was taken over in 1944 by Austin Briggs, then in 1948 by Mac Raboy, and since then has been drawn by several artists, including Dan Barry (with contributions from ...
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 ...