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Friday 17 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 ...
Watson, Tom
(1982- ) UK author whose first novel Metronome (2022) is set in a Near Future Dystopian UK where women have lost control of their bodies (see Sex; Women in SF); the protagonists, a young couple planning to conceive without permission, have been exiled to a northern Island. The focus on these years (see ...
Smyth, Clifford
(1866-1943) US editor of the New York Times Book Review 1913-1922, and author of The Gilded Man: A Romance of the Andes (1918), a Lost Race tale featuring the discovery of a living Incan civilization deep Underground beneath the South American Andes, boasting the high Technology necessary to maintain life in this redoubt, the Power Source for ...
Bates, Harry
Working name of US editor and author Hiram Gilmore Bates III (1900-1981), who began his career with the Clayton chain of Pulp magazines in the 1920s, working as editor of an adventure magazine. When William Clayton, the owner, suggested that Bates initiate a period-adventure companion to it, he successfully counterproposed a magazine to be called Astounding Stories of Super-Science, which would compete with Amazing Stories. Bates ...
Brooks, Kevin
(1959- ) UK author of Young Adult fiction, most of it nonfantastic, his best-known title being The Bunker Diary (2013), whose young protagonist is imprisoned in an Underground bunker; his torturer adds other prisoners, all of whom eventually die, including, at the very last, the young protagonist. The use of violence in this tale, and in several others, may seem surgical: but at the same time ...
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 ...