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Wednesday 29 June 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.
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Norman, John
Pseudonym used for his fiction by US author and philosophy teacher John Frederick Lange Jr (1931- ). His fiction mainly comprises a series of borderline-sf Planetary Romances set on Gor, a Counter-Earth sharing Earth's orbit but – because it is on the other side of the Sun – always invisible to us. This astrophysical impossibility is never argued in the texts, which might consequently read as either antiquarian sf or fantasy were it not that the development of ...
Up
Animated film (2009). Pixar/Walt Disney Pictures. Directed by Pete Docter. Written by Bob Peterson and Docter, based on a story by Docter, Peterson and Thomas McCarthy. Cast includes Edward Asner, Jordan Nagai and Christopher Plummer. 93 minutes. Colour. / A Lost World adventure with Steampunk flourishes, Up is most notable for containing two of the most effective tear-jerking scenes in cinema history. The first of these takes place at the outset of the film in an unforgettable montage that ...
Space Quest
Videogame series (from 1986). Sierra On-Line (SOL). / Space Quest is a series of linearly plotted graphical Adventures in which the player adopts the role of Roger Wilco, a janitor in a Space Opera universe who strongly resembles the protagonist of the text-based Planetfall (1983). The games' parodic style of humour and comic puzzles are alternately amusing and juvenile, similar in tone to a less frenetic version of Mel Brooks's film Spaceballs (1987). As in the animated series Futurama ...
Cross, Victoria
Pseudonym of India-born UK author Annie Sophie Cory (1868-1952) – also known as Vivian Cross; she was the sister of Adela Florence Nicolson (1875-1904) who wrote as Laurence Hope; early in her career, she was briefly notorious for The Woman Who Didn't (1895), written in response to Grant Allen's The Woman Who Did (1895). Her only known sf is Martha Brown, M.P.: A Girl of To-morrow (1935), which depicts relationships in a Utopian thirtieth-century UK ruled by women: unemployment, war and ...
Schroeder, Karl
(1962- ) Canadian author who began publishing work of genre interest with "The Pools of Air" in Tesseracts3 (anth 1990) edited by Candas Jane Dorsey and Gerry Truscott, collecting some of his short fiction in The Engine of Recall (coll 2005). The Claus Effect (coll 1997) with David Nickle is a surprisingly savage Satire on the Near Future world, Equipoisally combining fantasy and sf (see Horror in SF); in the first section of the tale, "The Toy Mill" (in Tesseracts4, anth ...
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 ...