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Sunday 19 May 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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Corman, Roger
(1926-2024) US film-maker, a number of whose films are sf. Born in Los Angeles, he graduated in engineering from Stanford University in 1947, and spent a period in the US Navy and a term at Oxford University before going to Hollywood, where he began to write screenplays; his first sale was Highway Dragnet (1954), a picture he coproduced. He soon formed his own company and launched his spectacularly low-budget career. From 1956 he was regularly associated with ...
SETI
Term coined outside the sf genre, standing for Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence – carried out by passive observation, typically using radio telescopes in hope of detecting Alien transmissions or Communications. A notable real-world effort was the 1960 observational Project Ozma founded by Frank Drake (1930-2022), sited at the US National Radio Astronomy Observatory (Green Bank, West Virginia) and discussed by Martin ...
Leisure
The gradual Automation of industry and the progressive reduction of working hours has already extended the amount of leisure time which citizens of the developed nations have, and most later twentieth-century images of the future assume that everyone will have even more of it in times to come. In The Next 200 Years: A Scenario for America and the World (1976), the Futures Studies authorities Herman ...
TV Greats: Space Stars of Movies and TV
US letter-size Cinema/Television magazine printed on newsprint paper. Publisher: Sterling's Magazines Inc. No editor named. Four issues from 1978 to 1980. / This magazine's parent publication TV Greats, launched in October 1977, was devoted to general film and television. Recognizing that Fantasy and sf had again become seriously profitable, Sterling cashed in with four erratically published ...
Waitman, Katie
Working name of US author Katherine Lura Waitman (1956- ), whose first novel, The Merro Tree (1997), though set in a Space Opera galaxy, intriguingly focuses on the struggle of a performance artist (see Arts) to exercise his high craft freely, and to achieve happiness in a same-sex but inter-species romance (see Sex). Waitman sets the tale in ...
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 ...