SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 2 June 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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Franklin, H Bruce
(1934-2024) US critic and academic, a cultural historian in various positions at Stanford University from 1961, in that year giving one of the earliest university courses in sf in the USA. In 1972, despite holding tenure, he was dismissed by Stanford for making speeches allegedly inciting students to riot against the university's involvement in the Vietnam War – a case well known to those interested in questions of academic freedom. He became full professor, again with tenure, at Rutgers ...
Weather Control
The human dream of controlling the weather is an old one. It appears in Proto SF in Samuel Johnson's Rasselas (1759), in the unreliable words of a Mad Scientist astronomer: "I have possessed, for five years, the regulation of weather, and the distribution of seasons: the sun has listened to my dictates, and passed, from tropick to tropick, by my direction; the clouds, at my call have ...
Great and Small
One of the commonest fantastic devices in literature and legend is the alteration of scale. Mythology and folklore abound with giants and miniature humans, and different perspectives dependent upon changes of scale are central to many of the Satires recognized today as works of Proto SF, most notably Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726; rev 1735) ...
Apple, A E
(1891-1963) US author of ramshackle crime thrillers, mostly at shorter lengths for Detective Story Magazine; these stories include a series featuring the Chinese Villain Mr Chang, something of a Yellow Peril figure though hardly in the Fu Manchu class. In the novel Mr Chang's Crime Ray: A Detective Story (9 April 1927 Detective Story Magazine; fixup 1928), Chang is ...
Smith, Clark Ashton
(1893-1961) US sculptor and author, of primary interest for his tales of Science Fantasy and horror (see Horror in SF); the rich style (sometimes idiomatic, sometimes "jewelled" in the early Lord Dunsany manner) and baroque invention of this work did much to transform the interplanetary romance of the early years of the century into the full-fledged Post-World War Two ...
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 ...