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Friday 6 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.
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Uncanny Tales
1. A US weird-menace Pulp magazine published by Manvis Publications, New York, and edited by Robert O Erisman (uncredited); five issues, April/May 1939 to May 1940. The first issue is volume 2, number 6, because it was a retitling of Star Detective, another weird-menace pulp, which had run from May 1935 to November 1938. It was a companion to Marvel Science Stories, and bore the usual lurid covers showing a young ...
Carlisle, Anne
(?1956- ) US film actress and author who co-wrote the film Liquid Sky (1982) directed by Slava Tsukerman, and later novelized her script as Liquid Sky (1987). Both film and book display elements of spoof Gothic: Aliens are discovered in New York harvesting humans for the addictive chemical they give off at the moment of orgasm (see Sex), but ...
Benchley, Peter
(1940-2006) US author best known for his first novel Jaws (1974), a best-selling tale of a great man-eating shark that terrorizes a seaside resort community; never strictly venturing into the fantastic, it has many effectively timed beats of Horror which were remorselessly amplified in the resulting Monster Movie Jaws (1975), directed by Steven Spielberg and ...
Vanguard Science Fiction
US Digest-size magazine. One issue, June 1958, published by Vanguard Science Fiction; edited by James Blish. Vanguard Science Fiction made a promising debut: it included the much-anthologized "Reap the Dark Tide" (vt "Shark Ship" in A Mile Beyond the Moon, coll 1958) by C M Kornbluth, plus what were intended as regular features by L Sprague ...
O'Brien, Fitz-James
(1828-1862) Irish-born US author, whose natal name was Michael O'Brien but who published his first poem in 1845 as Fitz-James O'Brien, which name he seems to have legally adopted around the time of his arrival in New York in 1852; he remained active until his death from an infected wound in the US Civil War. O'Brien contributed numerous poems and minor stories to the magazines, his first work of genre interest being "An Arabian Nightmare" for Household Words in 1851; but his importance ...
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 ...