An sf group active 1938-1945, significantly located in New York, then and now the publishing centre for American sf. The group was notable for radical politics and the conviction that sf fans should be forward-looking and constructive; the name came from J Michael Rosenblum's UK fanzine, The Futurian. Though deeply involved in Fanzine publishing and internal fan politics, The Futurians also brought together many young fans who hoped to become sf writers, and whose works tended to reflect a more intense and less hostile focus on the future of Cities than typical of American sf. Members included Isaac Asimov, James Blish, C M Kornbluth, Walter Kubilius, David A Kyle, Robert A W Lowndes, Freder...

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UK synth-pop band, who as "Ultravox!" (with exclamation mark) released a first eponymous album Ultravox! (1977). A modishly alienated work that uses synthesizers in a doomy and rather melodramatic manner, it nevertheless achieves some atmospheric moments, as in the urban noir of "Saturday Night In The City of the Dead", or the Robot-themed "I Want To Be A Machine". This last song, one of the band's early successes, situates itself in a subordinate relationship to Kraftwerk's cyborg electronica ("die mensch-maschine kissed me on my eyes"). The follow-up album Ha!-Ha!-Ha! (1977) (this and all subsequent releases were as by Ultravox with no exclamation mark) contains some effective post-apocaly...

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(1948-    ) UK pop composer and performer. Numan achieved a shortlived but notable commercial success with a series of futuristic songs performed to the accompaniment of electronic synthesizers, very much under the influence of Kraftwerk. Although the youthful angst of this music does sometimes veer into self-melodramatic nonsense, at its best these plangent soaring synth-melodies their pulsing, mechanic beats, and the mournful, slightly nasal vocals of Numan himself, create powerful and atmospheric aural sf landscapes.Numan's first release, Tubeway Army (1978, as by "Gary Numan and Tubeway Army"), though modishly spare and electronic, focused on contemporary urban spaces and is not sf. But...

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Term coined for that special sf brand of War which is fought across Time, usually with each side knowingly using Time Travel, tampering with causality and perhaps setting up destructive Time Paradoxes in an attempt to establish the ascendancy of one or another version of history. Although Fritz Leiber provided the name in his Change War series – notably The Big Time (March-April 1958 Galaxy; 1961 dos) and the stories assembled as The Change War (coll of linked stories 1978; cut vt Changewar 1983) – the classic example is Jack Williamson's The Legion of Time (May-July 1938 Astounding; rev 1952), with its rival future civilizations striving to manipulate the crucial Jonbar Point that determine...

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