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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 ...
Kerr, Geoffrey
Pseudonym of UK actor, screenwriter and author Geoffrey Kemble Grinham Keen (1895-1971), son of the actor-manager Frederick Kerr (1858-1933); he saw active service in World War One. His writing for Cinema includes the scenario for the successful supernatural comedy-romance The Ghost Goes West (1935) directed by René Clair, in which a Scottish castle is dismantled and reassembled in Florida, accompanied by its ...
Hinz, Christopher
(1951- ) US author who made a considerable impact with the Paratwa sequence: Liege-Killer (1987) – which won the Compton Crook/Stephen Tall Memorial Award for Best First Novel – Ash Ock (1989) and The Paratwa (1991). From the first, the sequence gives off a sense of professional polish and hurry, densely packing a wide variety of 1980s adventure-sf ...
Scholes, Robert
(1929-2016) US academic and sf critic. One of the better-known US theorists in structuralism, he is the author of a number of books on literary theory. In its sustained argument that the essential storytelling element in fiction contradicts any prejudicial inclination to think of the realist novel as more than a phase, The Nature of Narrative (1966; rev vt The Nature of Narrative: Revised and Expanded 2006) with Robert Kellogg (1928-2004) contributes to a fuller ...
Raife, Raymond
Pseudonym of an insecurely identified author, possibly Benjamin Hayward (? -? ), active from before 1900 in the magazines with most of his work 1908-1927 appearing in Boy's Own Paper (see Boys' Papers). Of sf interest are The Sheik's White Slave: Being an Account of the Unravelling of the Mysteries of the Temple of Djaramos (1895), a Lost Race tale set in North Africa, and ...
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 ...