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Saturday 9 November 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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Hildebrandt, The Brothers
Working name for the team of American artists Gregory J Hildebrandt (1939-2024) and Timothy Mark Allen Hildebrandt (1939-2006), identical twin brothers, although they also worked separately using the working names Greg Hildebrandt and Tim Hildebrandt. They will forever be regarded primarily as the definitive illustrators of J R R Tolkien because of the famous Tolkien calendars that featured their paintings of his characters; oddly enough, except for one 1975 ...
Harper, Vincent
Pseudonym of Cuban-born US Episcopal minister (later Catholic priest and still later agnostic), lecturer, author and playwright Henry Austin Adams (1861-1931), who normally wrote as H Austin Adams. His sf novel, The Mortgage on the Brain: Being the Confessions of the Late Ethelbert Craft, MD (1905), describes an electric-shock treatment which alters personality beneficially and undermines many then-conventional views of the nature of the mind and ...
Lott, S Makepeace
Working name of UK author Stanley Makepeace-Lott (1920-1991), whose Escape to Venus (1956) is an Orwell-influenced Dystopian view of a Venus colony established sixty years after the outbreak of World War Three in 1980. [JE]
Rammellzee
(1960-2010) US multi-disciplinary artist whose work covered performance art, rap, graffiti, painting, sculptor and comics. He drew on history, science, sf and popular culture to shape a mythology to inspire his artwork. An African-American/Italian who kept his real name secret, Rammellzee was part of New York's burgeoning rap and graffiti culture as it evolved in the late seventies, becoming a member of the city's underground art scene – which included the likes of Jean-Michel Basquiat, ...
Cryonics
A term coined in the 1960s by Karl Werner, referring to techniques for preserving the human body by supercooling. R C W Ettinger's The Prospect of Immortality (1964) popularized the idea that the corpses of terminally ill people might be "frozen down" in order to preserve them until such a time as medical science would discover cures for all ills and a method of resurrecting the dead. Many sf stories have extrapolated the notion. / The ...
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 ...